LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf. 



.Qj^W^ 



V> •! 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE 
RAMBLES. 

g)feetcl)e0, Hemini0cence0, anU Confessions:* 

BY 

ALMON GUNNISON, 

AUTHOR OF "rambles OVERLAND." 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERICK REMINGTON 
AND WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON. 




BOSTON: 

UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE 

1894. 









^'Ka 



Copyright, 1893, 
By Almon Gunnison. 



/Z-3ZU 



SSntbErsttg Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



/ 



PREFACE. 



OOME of the sketches which are brought 
together to form this book were first pub- 
lished in the paper with which the author has 
been connected for several years. This fact will 
explain the use of the much-abused editorial 
'* we," which will attract the attention and stir 
the wrath of the ever-esteemed critic. There 
are times when it is simply impossible to do 
without the comprehensive "we" as a cov- 
ering for the nakedness of one's egotism, and 
it is to be hoped that the genial critic, recog- 
nizing a modesty of which he is perhaps per- 
sonally ignorant, will excuse this conventional 
but comforting device. If the book seems to 
be somewhat personal, it will be noticed that 
among other things it professes to be a book 



vi PREFACE. 



of confessions. It has been written in the in- 
frequent intervals of a busy Hfe, and it makes 
no appeal to be considered as a classic. The 
author hopes, however, that it may give a little 
cheer to its readers, — should it have any. 

A. G. 

Worcester, Decemberj 1893. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

Orator John ..... c . 9 

Maybrook Farm 21 

The Harvest of a Quiet Eye ...... 36 

The House that Pete Built ....... 50 

Old Year's Reveries 62 

An Evening with the Negroes 72 

Running the Gauntlet of the "Isms" . . 81 

A Shattered Dream 92 

"White Wings" loi 

Sorrento 106 

A Lost Art 112 

The Spring Cleaning 122 

A Dream of the Adriatic 126 

The Story of a Mother 134 

The Heroes of One Show 143 

The Confessions of a Bashful Man ... 158 



viii CONTENTS. 

The Shadow Side 172 

With the Rank of Captain , . 183 

The Student's Workshop ........ 190 

The Parson's Small Boy 200 

An Alaskan Voyage . - 211 

The Stocking at the Chimney , 220 

The Last Night in the Old House . , = . 231 



WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



ORATOR JOHN. 

AT the beginning of the fall term of '62 the 
Green Mountain Institute was at the zenith of 
its prosperity. Professor Saunders, who for several 
years had been at its post of control, had arrested the 
waning of its influence, and had brought it honorable 
repute. Students who had felt the mysterious charm 
which pervaded the little village, and the strange 
fascination of the young teacher's enthusiasm, had 
carried to their homes glowing reports of the school ; 
and from the adjacent villages, and even from towns 
in States other than Vermont, young men and women 
in large numbers had come to pursue their studies in 
this country village. 

Somewhere among the hills of New England, Na- 
ture may have hidden a more lovely village than 
South Woodstock, but one can wander far to find 
so nearly the ideal spot for the bright days of student 
life. A single street, Hned with trim New England 
cottages ; the white church with its open lawn ; the 



lO IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

old academy on the hill ; the little river Kedron, 
bordered with trees and dark with shrubbery ; the 
broad sweep of the shapely hills that rose on every 
side, — gave a grace and beauty to the little village, 
which, in spite of the more pretentious claims of its 
rivals of later years, has kept its fair pre-eminence. 

Nowhere else did the forest paths seem to lead into 
such inviting depths of shade, nor the maples stand 
in such queenly pride. Not elsewhere was there such 
lustrous green of foliage ; and in the autumn, when 
the early frosts touched the hills, and these old mon- 
archs hung out their myriad banners in the hazy air. 
it seemed as if the atmosphere itself was bathed in 
color. Winter came early and lingered late, but there 
was wine in the air. The summer nights were things 
to be remembered ; and a poet's land of dreams 
never rivalled in its enchantments the soft music of 
those Sabbath mornings, when far off upon the hills 
there came the sound of the church bells, broken into 
a thousand tones by the woods and hills. 

Among the new students of the term was a long, 
lank young man from an adjoining village, whom we 
shall call John. He was large for his age, and of 
a confiding nature. By one of the strange accidents 
of school life he was sent to room with a young 
Massachusetts student, whose bump of fun was large, 
and who was by nature an inveterate tease. He soon 
found out that John was not without his weak points, 



ORATOR JOHN. 



II 



and taking into his confidence one or two friends, 
a conspiracy was formed against the artless youth, 
which for several weeks afforded amusement to the 
school. A casual word revealed the fact that John 
made some pretentions to orator- 
ical skill, and his ambition was in- 
flamed by the most persistent flat- 
tery. In a few days he refused to 
go into the reading class, boldly 
asserting the professor's incompe- 
tency to instruct him. Knowing 
that by this disregard of rules he 
would be abandoned by the teacher 
to his fate, his flatterers proceeded 
to extravagant lengths. 

It was the nightly entertainment 
of the little coterie of tormentors to 
assemble in one of the students' 
rooms, and there, prostrate on the 
floor, with ears close to the stove- 
pipe that came from the lower room, 
to listen to the elocutionary drill 
administered by the youthful orator 
to one of the number who, with the assumed in- 
terest of a disciple, sat for instruction at his feet. 
John was not an expert in pronunciation, and his 
renderings were not likely to escape the memory. 
" Parrhasius and the Captive " was one of his 




V 



^ 



^' 



12 IV AYS IDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Star pieces. With what vehemence he recited the 
lines, — 

" Parrhasius stood, gazing forgetfully 
Upon his canvas. There Prometheus lay 
Chained to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus — 
The vulture at his vitals." 

The hght was not good, and the piece was new, and 
up the stove-pipe hole came the words, — 

*' Pizarro stood, gazing forgetfully 
Upon his canvas. There Prometheus lay 
Chained to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus — 
The vulture at his vittles." 

With what assiduous care was John trained to 
speak, at the rhetorical exercises of Saturday, '^ The 
Maniac Mother; " with what extravagance of gesture, 
with what clawings of the air, did he shriek out the 
cries of the mad woman, while before him the 
students sat clutching the seats in their agonizing 
struggles to keep from explosive laughter. The per- 
formance over, the conspirators would vie with each 
other in their flatteries. " Never did Demosthenes 
stir men's hearts as had our John. Eloquence had 
found its greatest master in the pride of our school, 
and the future had its highest prizes waiting for the 
brow of this prodigy." Looking back, it seems in- 
credible that human credulity could be so imposed 
upon. But it was so irresistibly funny ; even the most 
stolid of students so entered into the humor of the 



ORATOR JOHN. 73 



thing ; there was such unity of purpose and simi- 
larity of flattery on the part of his companions, — that 
even a wiser person than an overgrown country boy 
of sixteen might have been deluded. Interest in 
ordinary studies flagged. John had tasted the sweets 
of success; he had a mission in the world, and, 
encouraged by these friends, who were so deferential, 
who with such unanimity praised his talents and pre- 
dicted his fame, day and night were spent in training 
for his oratorical displays. 

The literary society met on Friday evenings. It 
was the social event of the week. The work in hand 
now was to bring the young orator out in debate. 
His past success had not been in the way of extempo- 
raneous oratory, and even his monumental assurance 
shrank from the new ordeal. But patient pleadmgs 
prevailed, and the young man promised to appear if 
two of the confederates, *' Bragg " and " Smith, " 
would write his speech. The conditions were accepted 
and the work was done. For several weeks John was 
withdrawn from observation and carefully coached. 
Every possible extravagance of voice and gesture was 
impressed upon him ; and when ingenuity could add 
no new absurdity, notice was given of the approach- 
ing exhibition. 

The night came, and every seat in the Institute was 
crowded. Expectancy was at its height as John 
entered with his trainers. Art had been busy with 



14 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the decoration of his person. His neck-tie was of 
flaring colors and huge proportions ; his ample boots 
were brilliant with immaculate polish ; his hair was 
beaded with the barber's oil ; and as with an orator's 
art he drew his handkerchief, the air was filled with 
its heavy perfume. At the appointed time in the 
debate, John arose and delivered himself of the 
following, which we transcribe from a copy printed 
from the original notes. The question for debate 
was, " Resolved, that the traffic in intoxicating liquors 
should be suppressed by force." Our memory does 
not serve as to the side that John took, and the 
internal evidences of the speech unfortunately give 
little clew ; but here are his words : — 

" Ladies, Gentlemen, and Mr. President, — This ques- 
tion is one which concerns us all, individually, collec- 
tively, and emphatically. It is a subject that since the 
establishment of the Christian era, yea, ever since our 
forefathers, whose tracks of blood might be seen upon 
the desert sands of Cape Horn, landed upon the verdant 
rock of Plymouth, — ever since then, Mr. President, this 
subject has agitated the minds of all profound philoso- 
phers, statesmen, and tavern-keepers. 

" It was for taking the opinion which I advocate here 
to-night, sir, that Socrates, that able general, that pro- 
found scholar and Christian man, met his fate gloriously 
upon the gallows. It was for taking this opinion that 
Demosthenes, that insatiate orator, but alas, confirmed 
drunkard, was executed by order of the British Govern- 
ment. But, Mr. President, I care not for their fate. I 
stand here to-night, in all the strength of my growing fame 



ORATOR JOHN. 15 



and powerful ability, to assert with a mighty voice the 
rights of man. Let no one charge me with dishonor, for 
I must, like the mountain eagle of the Andes, have my 
unrestrained liberty and freedom of speech, I can truly 
say in the language of the late Mr. Shakespeare (who, I 
am sorry to learn, recently met with an untimely end), 
' Give me liberty or give me death.' I shall assert my 
opinion here to-night, Mr. President, on the floor of this 
house, freely, ignoramously, and idiotically. Sir, who, I 
ask, was he that carried the ' Star Spangled Banner ' of 
France into the cold desert sands of Siberia, burned the 
Turkish Capitol, and led back his army amidst the vine- 
clad rocks and citron groves of sunny France? It was 
Napoleon, sir, — Napoleon Bonaparte, I repeat, — a man, 
although short in stature (whose average weight at any 
one time did not exceed 135 lbs. avoirdupois), who did 
this; and how, Mr. President } Simply, sir, simply by the 
use of intoxicating liquors. For, sir, when the Spanish 
chivalry of France was about to lie down and die on 
the bare and dilapidated shores of Russia, we read 
that N. Bonaparte telegraphed to the EngHsh monarch, 
Henry VIII., for a cargo of intoxicating liquors ; and 
giving these to his ill-clad men, he put new spirits into 
them, and they nobly achieved their independence from 
the Russian yoke of Turkish tyranny. 

" Was it not for a worthy object that Alexander the 
Great crossed the roaring Rubicon and startled with his 
mighty voice the reindeers and fleet antelopes of Gaul ? 
Then did he give utterance to that Latin proverb, ' Omnis 
Gallis divisa est in partes tres,' which means in our 
language, ' Wine makes glad the heart of man.' 

" But the swiftly flying moments bid me cease my 
harangue, and I will now close as I began in the touch- 
ing language of John Q. Milton, ' Sink or swim, survive 
or perish, I give my heart and hand to this vote.' " 



1 6 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

The young man felt the importance of the hour. 
His preparation had been complete, and no trick 
of gesture or absurdity of vocal extravagance was 
omitted. 

It was not to be imagined that John swallowed the 
speech without some inward qualms. Some of the 
students who were not admitted into the confidence 
of the conspirators in their excess of envy sought to 
raise the sceptical element in the young man's nature. 
John wavered, for example, on the description of 
Demosthenes as the ''insatiate orator;" but he was 
assured, with the calmness that carries conviction, that 
the word " insatiate " was the name of a tribe of 
Indians in Africa, called the '' Insatiates," distin- 
guished among the tribes for their activity and 
prowess, so that the word, following the law of phil- 
ological development, had come to stand as the 
synonym of '' action," " force," " movement." De- 
mosthenes was pre-eminently the orator of ''action," 
and therefore the adjective " insatiate " was used with 
singular appropriateness. 

A young marplot in the Virgil class had intimated 
that the Latin sentence " Omnis Gallis, etc.," was 
mistranslated, and John brought his doubts to his faith- 
ful friend Bragg. With ill-concealed surprise Bragg 
explained the impossibility of a mistake. John's in- 
formant was the dunce of his class, and his knowledge 
of Latin was proverbially meagre. "You know very 



ORATOR JOHN. I J 



well," said Bragg, '' that Omnis means wine." John 
said of course he knew that word was right. " Then 
even an English scholar must know that the Latin 
verb gallio, gallere, galliri, etc., means * to do,' ' to 
accomplish,' 'to make.'" John confessed that he 
had never doubted the second word ; and so word by 
word the legend was translated, the words in Latin 
and English by a fortunate coincidence being the 
same in number, and the young man went away with 
his last doubt removed. The words "idiotically" 
and " ignoramously," which even John's credulous 
nature would have rebelled at, were not in the original 
notes, but were inserted just previous to the speech, 
when, under the stress and confusion of his excitement, 
these last touches were added, as crowning glories 
whose beauty would have been marred and probably 
eliminated by rehearsal. 

The audience was convulsed, of course ; but as John, 
bending the knee and with clasped hands as if in 
prayer, turned his fresh, fair face heavenward during 
the recitation of his Latin sentence, there was no sign 
in him of any emotion save that of triumph. 

It was difficult longer to keep up the delusion. 
Relations of such intimacy had been established that 
it was not easy to shake him off. The boys had 
laughed themselves out ; and so, with that irony of 
ingratitude which belongs to fallen human nature, 
a copy of the young man's speech, with marginal 



1 8 WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

notes, was sent over the hills to the home of his 
parents, and the young orator was summarily recalled 
to the old farm. 

Several years went by. The young conspirators, be- 
lying the promises of their youth, were fast merging 
into respectable citizens. The counting-house of one 
of the mills of Massachusetts contained one of them ; 
legend said that some of the staid professions claimed 
others ; while the young man Bragg, now a reputable 
practitioner, not far away, was rapidly coming into 
fame as a country doctor. 

Riding along one day through the village which had 
been the home of the young orator, the doctor saw 
walking before him a stranger, and, after the hospita- 
ble manner of the country, drew up his horse and 
invited him to ride. As the stranger turned, the 
affrighted doctor saw that it was John. The rawness 
of youth had solidified into the massive strength of 
manhood, and the man of science had heard in many 
ways of the ominous threats of mutilation and murder 
that John had uttered against the conspirators. How- 
ever, with placid face hiding an apprehensive spirit, 
the doctor dwelt with conspicuous volubility on the 
character of the country and the general run of the 
weather. But the thoughts of his companion wan- 
dered. He sat in dreamy meditation. A strange 
light, half of remembrance, was in his eye, and there 
was an appearance of abstraction, as if in the mem- 



ORATOR JOHN. 19 



ory some half-forgotten thing was being sought 
for. 

At last he exclaimed, " Is your name Bragg?" 

Gulping down, with convulsive agony, his con- 
science and his fears, the doctor answered, " No ! my 
name is Brown, James Brown." 

His companion was silent, as if but half convinced. 
A pause ensued, in which the trembling doctor vainly 
tried to resume the topic of the weather ; but John 
was busy with his thoughts. 

At last he said, " Were you ever a student at 
Woodstock? " 

^•Woodstock," thoughtfally answered the physician, 
'•'Did I not come through such a town this morning? 
A large hne town with an open square? " 

" Yes, but that is not the place. South Woodstock, 
I mean, — a little village five miles this side." 

The doctor mused again, — " thought he remem- 
bered the place, and was struck with the appearance 
of an academy-looking building, which he supposed 
was a church. No, he had never been there to school ; 
had always lived on a farm, and had had but few 
advantages of education, a thing which in his vocation 
as the keeper of a country store he found constantly 
operating to his disadvantage." 

The inquiries of the baffled John ceased. He was 
not satisfied, but he was quieted. He merely re- 
marked, in a subdued tone, but with a dark, malignant. 



20 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

revengeful look in his eyes, '^ I used to know a man 
by the name of Bragg when I was at that place at 
school, and I would like to meet him. He did n't treat 
me just right. I never saw two men who looked so 
much alike ! " 

Still with a faint tremor of apprehension the genial 
doctor remarked that " he had often been taken for 
other men, and it was singular how strong the re- 
semblance often was between entire strangers." 

By this time the village had been reached, and the 
passenger, with quiet thanks, but still with that mys- 
terious, searching, baffled look upon his face, alighted. 

The traveller's horse moved on, the pulse of the 
practitioner gradually recovered its normal beat, the 
color came back slowly to his cheeks, and like one 
who had escaped some overshadowing peril, the soli- 
tary man drove on his way. 

The youthful orator is already past middle life. 
He has become a shrewd, keen, successful man of busi- 
ness, held in honor among his neighbors and warm 
repute among his friends. The school-days at the 
Green Mountain Institute are remembered by him 
with pleasure ; and he tails, probably with pardonable 
emendations, the story of the night in the debating 
society, when in the days of his fresh youth he 
delivered the solitary speech which was destined to 
make him famous in the annals of the school as 
"Orator John." 



MAYBROOK FARM. 

WE had always sighed for a farm. Was there 
ever a man brought up on a farm who did 
not wish to end his days on one ? No matter if he 
hated it as a boy, he ahvays dreamed of it as a man. 
Of course, ministers' children ari not brought up on 
special farms or anywhere else in particular ; but 
then there was farm blood in our ancestry, and we 
have the instinct by inheritance. A friend, who once 
edited the '' New England Homestead," in answer to 
the questions of his subscribers as to how he knew so 
much about farming, used to say, " Why, 1 lived 
twelve years on a farm." '' I did not tell them," he 
slyly said to us, " that they were the first twelve years 
of my life." 

Well, we spent a portion of our life on a farm. 
Not a great portion, but still enough to get a love for 
it. Of course we could not master the whole science 
of farm work in the two weeks, but we learned the 
rotary motion of the grindstone, that the cows are 
milked at night, and that the sun gets hot toward 
noon. We followed the hay-cart with a hand-rake, 
and in the wake of the mower cut down the burdock 



22 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

in the fence corners. The contract was entirely 
unselfish on our part, for it specified that we were to 
get just what we earned ; and at the conclusion of the 
engagement, the farmer, who was a cobbler on wet 
days, gave us a pair of shoes. They have lain heavy 
on our conscience ever since as an overpayment ; but 
the farmer's wife and daughters bullied him into it, 
and saw no reason that we should be made to suffer 
because we left off early, especially as we made it up 
by beginning late. 

So our readers will see how natural it was that 
we should be ambitious for a farm. To be sure, the 
neighbors, whose back windows overlooked our yard, 
never perhaps suspected the dream we cherished. 
Cynical members of our own unappreciative house- 
hold had been wont to remark that they should 
think that people who aspired to a farm would at 
least occasionally work out their bucolic tastes on the 
land they had ; but it was not a paltry garden to 
which we aspired. We yearned for a farm of lordly 
acres ; and so through the years we have been wont 
to dream that when we came to our " Castle in 
Spain," it would be upon a farm ; and while we 
dreamed, the weeds beneath our study windows 
grew rankly and merrily. 

Well, we have come to it at last, and Maybrook 
completely fills the outlines of our dream. It was not 
a common farm we sighed for, with stony fields and 



MAYBROOK FARM. 25 

broken fences, and yards much littered ; with house 
unfurnished and barns disordered ; with herds of 
common stock and horses sullen with ignoble blood. 
It was a farm that was rich in splendid outlooks, with 
meadows starred with flowers and pavilioned with 
lordly branches ; with gleaming brooks and woods 
that had deep shadows in them ; a farm rimmed with 
hills, with wide-eyed cattle feeding in the sun, and 
horses swift of instinct to find the beauty that hides 
in grass-grown roads. It was a farm w^herein the 
processes of labor should be unobtrusive. The 
mower's scythes should cut for the rhythm of their 
music, and the grass should change to hay for the 
odor's sake ; the cows should feed in the meadows 
not for the milking, but for the landscape ; and the 
farmer should count his acres fruitful if the crop of 
beauty was abundant, and esteem his trees not for 
the lumber they would mill, but for the shadows 
they would cast. 

Of course we know that butter does not grow in 
the buttercups, that crops must be planted and tended 
with much homely labor, and that if men will eat, the 
farmer must toil with calloused hand and sweat of 
face. But men need beauty as well as bread, and 
the farm we sighed for was one that grew both of 
these crops, and somewhere we knew that there was 
such a place ; in Arcady, perhaps, but somewhere on 
the earth, or in the land of dreams. We did not 



26 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



think that we should find it at Maybrook, in the 
Harlem Valley. 

But here it is. Not that this is any enchanted place, 
where trees are raised for their shadows, and the 
grass is grown for the daisies. The cows that are 
feeding in the meadows are distilling their cuds into 

merchandise at the rate of 
twenty quarts at a milking ; 
and in the carts which are 
winding 
through the 
fields 




as though they were there only to give the landscape 
life, there is good honest compost for the corn. We 
half suspect that the waste water from the fountains 
feeds the cattle-troughs beyond ; and we know that 
behind the hedges, across the brook from the con- 
servatory with its orchids and exotics, there is a 



MAY BROOK FARM. 27 

kitchen-garden. Our friend who lives at Maybrook 
is not the kind of man to be content to feed on 
dreams and moonbeams ; and has he not told us 
that "the farm pays"? — although the book-keeping 
which brings the balance on the credit side we sus- 
pect is of that peculiar kind that men invent when 
they have unquiet consciences and wives whom they 
desire to propitiate. But we have not told anything 
about Maybrook yet. 

It is set in the midst of the Harlem Valley, seventy 
miles or so northward from New York. Beyond the 
sloping hills on the eastward side is the Housatonic, 
and beyond the western rampart is the Hudson. 
When the Lord parcelled out the beauty for the three 
valleys, the Harlem helped itself first, and the other 
valleys took what was left over. A mile or so above 
the village, the road which has skirted the great plain 
turns eastward, running in a bewitching curve beneath 
an avenue of maples, and so along a hundred rods or 
more, until it comes to the upward end of the great 
field which stretches unbroken southward to the vil- 
lage ; and this is Maybrook. The house itself is 
rather a villa than a house, with broad piazzas and 
tower on the eastward side, and many rooms within, 
as befits the home of hospitality. 

But it is the farm, and not the house, that we set 
out to tell about ; and we shall not linger to tell of 
the art and luxury gathered here within this pleasant 



28 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

home. The house is set within the midst of lawns, 
as green and lustrous as the fields one sees in England 
on the Midland Road, with winding roads and grace- 
ful shrubberies, and flower-beds kept bright with 
blooming flowers. There are the greenest hedges 
round the great yard, not high, as though intrusion 
were warded off, but low and green, as if to say, 
"We want to share with every passer-by the beauty 
of our lawns and flowers." There are trees set in 
just the place that Nature would have chosen had she 
been asked her mind, and graceful fountains are where 
the wind can catch the spray and weave it into 
draperies of mist. Backward, stretching through 
the lawns, is a path which leads to the greenhouse 
set far up, and on each side there are great lines of 
blooming geraniums, looking for all the world like 
the scarlet-coated lines of soldiers through which 
the Queen of England walks when she enters one 
of the royal buildings. Midway in this yard of 
many acres there is a brook, which comes from the 
woods beyond, flows through Maybrook Farm, and 
empties into the Weebatuck, half a mile away. It 
is twenty feet or more in width, and bounded by the 
low walls which rise to the level of the lawn. It is 
a mountain stream ; and not a gurgle nor a murmur 
that it learned in the woods will it yield or disguise, 
but it sings on over the rocks as fresh and beautiful 
as when it was born in the cavern of the woods 



MAYBROOK FARM. 29 

beyond. In the midst of it there is a great elm, 
seemingly large enough for the building of a frigate. 
You shall run your line for more than a hundred feet 
before you can measure the diameter of its shadow on 
a summer's day. It keeps its roots in the brook, as 
though it loved it ; and the brook keeps it fresh and 
green, willing to pay the toll, which the tree drinks 
up, for the sake of the shadows which keep it cool 
and remind it of the forest from which it came. 

Crossing the road we enter the great farm. For a 
quarter of a mile, by a winding road as smooth as a 
city parkway, we come down to the great barns by 
the banks of the Weebatuck, where the hundred Hol- 
steins live. When the millennium comes, and cows 
like other folks get all their rights, and the aristocrats 
among them wish to build a kind of club-house for 
the nabobs of their kind, they will send a committee to 
Maybrook for their plans. It is the summer-time, 
and this is the winter palace. The Holsteins have 
taken the field, and the barn is sweet with lime and 
lavender. 

We came to Maybrook to help our friend gather in 
his summer crops. We are not visitors or idlers, 
but workers here. We should be ashamed to be 
drones when all the world around us is at work. 
Maybrook has double crops, — the grass that makes 
the milk and the grass that makes flowers ; the trees 
that make lumber and the trees that make shadows ; 



2,0 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the water that cools the milk and the water that sings 
in the brook and makes mist- wreaths around the foun- 
tains. We are simply to be counted among the farm- 
hands ; but because there are double crops the work 
must be done in double gangs, and we are at work 



A 



'^ ^ 






^^;i<* 



on the invisible harvests. 
We gather the music and 
the melody, the odors 
and the sunshine ; we 
have charge of the brook 

to see if its songs are all in tune ; we watch the flow- 
ers to see if their dyes are fast and true, and watch 
the Holsteins, with no thought of their udders, but 
only to see if they keep their backs of ebony just 
where the sun will make them shine like beetles' 
wings. So, of course, we cannot tell the things which 
do not come within our province. We know that 
Maybrook comprises six hundred acres ; that the 
Holsteins have a pedigree that goes back, for aught 



MAYBROOK FARM. 31 



we know, to the Norman Conquest ; that they run 
milk hke the rivers of Canaan, and that Hke all 
other folks of great degree and ancient lineage, they 
come awfully high ; that the milk is sent twice a day 
over the hills to the factory ; that it goes in big cans 
and is drawn by a span of horses that carry their 
docked tails as airily as though they were hauling the 
American aristocracy instead of dragging milk ; that 
some of the cows give twenty quarts at a time, and 
would give more if the milkers were not ashamed 
to be so mean as to take it ; that the aggregate 
of milk sold is in the tons, we forget how many, 
either ten or a hundred, perhaps between the two. 
There are hospitals for the sick, private apartments 
for the convalescents, and great yards where they can 
take their sun-baths in winter. In fact, the Holsteins 
seem to have everything except a reading-room and 
a gymnasium ; and these they would doubtless have, 
with a five-cent coffee-house thrown in, if there were 
any poor among them. 

We are afraid that those of our indulgent readers 
who are themselves wrestling with the farm-hand 
problem will do us the injustice to think that as 
farm-hands we are not really earning the board which 
is our wages. But we can assure them that we are no 
idlers. The men in the other gang do not work 
longer hours. When the milkers go to their task we 
go to ours ; we go out and see the dew go off, and 



32 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

note the roses that have opened ; we let the birds 
sing to us, and take the messages that the brook has 
brought down in the night out of the heart of the 
woods. The other men, who run the mowers in the 
field, have easy task here at Maybrook compared 
with ours. Nature offers no resistance to the gather- 
ing of the crops they seek. But she hides from us, 
and makes us gather our harvests by stealth. The 
Holsteins need no wooing ; but these sprites that have 
a message for us hide in the woods when they hear 
our footfall, and we must coax them forth, and entice 
them to tell their story. 

One canno invade the silences of Nature with bois- 
terous sound, nor seize her riches with a burglar's 
violence. It is necessary to despoil her by indirec- 
tion. Margaret Fuller used to say that " Nature 
would not be stared at," and he who would find the 
secrets of Nature's life must look as the astronomers 
do, when with the naked eye they look at a star : they 
see it best by looking at the one that is nearest it. 
And so while with a chatter and noise the other farm- 
hands at Maybrook do their work, we must keep 
silence, that we may interpret the silences of Nature, 
bringing to the fields and woods, the brook and the 
tree, that inner vision which alone interprets Nature, 
thus heeding well the old counsel of the seer, to 

" Seal up both the eyes 
And send them to the heart." 



MAYBROOK FARM. 



33 



And then is it as easy as mowing and reaping to hear 
the " sweet voices that in the grasses talk," and 
strain the heart's inner hearing that it may catch the 
sounds with which " Nature is vocal to him that hath 
the listening ear." 

Moreover, the other men have no territory for 
their work besides the six hundred acres of May- 
brook's fields 
and woods. But 
we must climb 




"-«, f-s^-wTn^ 



the clouds with the 
sunset to find the 

texture of the purple and golden draperies with which 
it robes the skies ; we must drive over the hills where, 
in the nooks of pasture walls, Nature has made her 
Tichest tangles of weed and brier ; we must skirt the 
gorge of the woods to see where Nature in fern and 
flower has hid her masterpieces. And the night brings 



34 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

no cessation of work for us ; for if the day uttereth 
speech, the night showeth knowledge. There are odors 
that are distilled only under the pressure of the night 
air. The moonlight spiritualizes Nature and compels 
new interpretations. Altogether, it is a busy life that we 
are leading here at Maybrook. The crops that we have 
come to gather are ripening fast in these glorious 
summer days. The hills, the broad field, the lawns 
and flowers, the hedges and the running brook, the 
drooping elm-branches, the deep recesses of the 
woods, where the ferns and bushes rock the cradle of 
the brook, — all these, and the uncatalogued beauties 
of this fair Maybrook, invite us to loiter and listen, 
and let our souls delight themselves with fatness. 

And then beyond it all, when the day has been 
crowded to the brim with beauty, and the eye is weary 
with the burden of its delights, and the heart needs 
quietude that it may put away forever upon its walls 
the pictures of the day, the night comes with the 
social joys of Maybrook. Within the home, adorned 
with all that art and literature, music and culture, can 
give, or within the little building which, made into a 
single room of beauty, spans the brook, we gather 
when the darkness comes, to talk of the day's delights 
and plan new joys for the coming day. How fairy- 
like it seems, this stately room, with frescoed ceilings 
and walls of oak, and every device which ingenious 
art could fashion, to create a room of beauteous com- 



MAY BROOK FARM. 35 

fort here, and set it over the brook between the 
lawns and in the shadow of the ehn. And so de- 
hghtful nights follow delicious days here at our May- 
brook home, while the brook sings on, and the world 
goes round, and we sink to rest no longer to dream of 
our Castle in Spain, but to rejoice that we have come 
to it at last, and that its name is Maybrook. 



THE HARVEST OF A QUIET EYE. 

OF course, in coming to Maybrook to help our 
friend gather in his crops, we could not at once 
do a full stint of work. Even the other men, who are 
harvesting the hay, have been obliged first to harden 
palm and muscle. We have had no desire to loiter at 
our work, but in the kind of harvesting that we have 
come to do, we cannot either force the crops or drive 
the workmen. If we would have the new birds come 
in our hearts and build their nests, we must open our 
windows and let the old birds fly out. 

So thus far we have been preparing for our work. 
We have caught snatches of the songs the brook 
sings, have listened for a moment to the murmuring 
of the leaves, and glanced at the shadows that are 
marching up and down the hills ; we have tried our 
muscles, as it were, as the mowers test their scythes 
before the day's work. But " the world is too much 
with us " yet. The roar of the year's life not yet 
has died to silence ; the old birds not yet have made 
way for the nesting of the new tenants. 

In coming back to Nature, one has something of 
the feeling that he experiences in going back to his 



THE HARDEST OF A QUIET EYE. 37 

childhood's home. The old associations seek to 
enter the heart, but they find other occupants, and 
they refuse to speak and we refuse to hear in the 
presence of strangers. There is always in our first 
meeting with Nature a sense of disappointment. The 
haunting voices of the world distrust the silence 
which is Nature's speech ; and as lovers, meeting after 
separation, miss the expected rapture until they braid 
anew the subtile threads of fellowship which the alien 
world has broken, so Nature at first is silent and un- 
responsive, and we must let the world's echoes die 
away before we find complete restoration in the old 
love. 

But now it is time for our full work of harvesting ; 
and while the other workmen are at their tasks we 
shall go through the fields, following the brook, and 
shall gather 

" The harvest of a quiet eye." 

Had the day been other than it is, we should not 
have come here for our work. Had it been bright 
with blue skies, and brilliant with flashing sunbeams, 
we should have climbed the hills and harvested the 
rolling clouds and the exhilarations of waving grasses. 
Had it been a day of mists, we should have gathered 
the perfumes that the pressure of the mists distils ; 
but this is Forest Day, and as surely as the fish say, on 
days that are overcast, '- We will graciously be caught 
to-day," so the woods have now their heaviest crops. 



38 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES 

and woe betide us if we reap in the meadows when 
Nature has her harvests ready for us in the woods. 
We think that we must have read somewhere that 
Nature creates days for special insights and outlooks. 
Does not Emerson tell us that the scholar must await 
the right hour for reading Plato's "Timoeus;" 
that God makes special days when the elect of the 
ages graciously draw near to men and are responsive 
to man's questionings, but when their hour of eleva- 
tion is gone they become but dumb oracles again ! 

This is Forest Day. The slumberous air was made 
for the insects of the woods. How they will sing 
and frolic and spread their wings ! Were it Moun- 
tain Day, their music would be lost in the whisper- 
ing winds ; were it Ocean Day, the air were too 
heavy for spreading out the glories of all their 
gossamer vanities. The leaves will be alive, and yet 
they will have time for pleasant gossipings. The 
ferns will carry each graceful curve in clear relief, 
while every frond and plume will have a background 
of gently waving grasses and flossy tapestries of vine 
and tendril. 

Do our readers care to know something of the 
place where we are to gather our harvests ? If they 
will but go into the nearest wood they shall see what 
place it is in which we are set to harvest ; for the 
woods of Maybrook, though they are richly dowered, 
are not unlike other woods that hide a world of won- 



THE HARl/EST OF A QUIET EYE. 39 

ders from us within sight of half our homes, while we 
comprehend them not. 

There is a brook which comes down out of the 
mysteries of the hills. It flows over stones which 
have been ebonized by suns, and scarred by floods ; 
it murmurs among sUvered pebbles and rocks from 
which float tresses as long as those the Spartan maid- 
ens combed on the morning of the day their lovers 
held the pass. What a wondrous thing is a brook ! 
Mysterious in its birth, elusive in its death ; cradled 
in the mists of the hills, lost in the mists of the sea ; 
but between the two vague boundaries of its being it 
hews its channel, waters the meadows, swings the 
hammer of the forge, turns the factory shaft, floats 
the wheels of commerce, and bears away the city's 
waste. 

By-and-by this brook wiU serve the other hands, 
who, with us, are set to gather the crops of May- 
brook. The gardener wiU divert its channel for his 
plants, the hostler for his hose, the foreman for his 
troughs. Have we not equal rights with these ? So 
we shall put phantom wheels within the brook, build 
our mills among the branches, and do our weavings 
here ; and we shall let the brook turn the lathes and 
be the lapidary to polish these pebbles. While we 
are at our harvestings and the brook is helping us, we 
shall not compel it to make merry for us, as the Phil- 
istines did their slave, but shall simply hear its music, 



40 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 








knowing that, 
gossip as it is, 
it will tell the 
inmost secret 
of its heart, 
if we but lis- 
ten. There is, 
of course, a 
>&:L road that fol- 
lows the brook 
upward to the 
old h o m e- 
stead of its 
birth. Green-carpeted it is, 
with mossy rocks between its 
ruts, and there are great 



THE HARDEST OF A QUIET EYE. 41 

ledges on these hills which bound the gorge, trying 
to look sternly at us ; but kindly Nature, in smooth- 
ing out the wrinkles of her frown, has left veils of 
verdure, behind which, if the ledges frown, they 
must do so unseen. Then there are great trees, which 
have written the record of half a century on bark 
and trunk, somehow knowing that this day would 
come, and we should come to read their story. 

But we shall not tell too minutely the things we 
gather here. You will never know, most curious 
friend, the names of the rocks, the dip of the strata 
here, nor shall we tell you the names of the trees, or 
the titles that the flowers have. Must we enumerate 
each separate wheat-head that we gather in our 
harvestings ? Cannot we enjoy the trees without an 
estimate of the cubic feet they will measure at the 
mill? Are the strata of the ledges more than their 
moss and lichen ? Are we like a mere botanist, who 
misses the blossom that he may count the seeds in 
the pod, who spoils the flower to find its name, and 
esteems its name more than its beauty? 

It is heresy, we know, to say it, but we believe that 
this dissecting of Nature makes one incapable either 
of understanding or of loving her. You can no more 
carry your botanizing box with you to the woods, and 
learn the flowers, than you can study the birds with 
a rifle. Does not the great seer of Nature ask, — 

" Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
If not, thou knowest not the birds." 



42 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

The Greeks were poor anatomists, but it was their 
chisel that carved Venus and Apollo. The tyro in 
our modern schools could teach them the laws of 
crystallization, the processes of vegetable growth ; 
but they saw dryads in the woods, found angels in 
stone, and made the marble breathe. We have no 
contest with these wooden-hearted pedants, who can 
give the catalogue of all the ologies ; who have micro- 
scopes, but not eyes ; who know the names of all 
the flowers, but never have learned the mystery of a 
single blossom ; who have analyzed the salts and acids 
in the earth, but never have felt the beat of its 
mighty heart or interpreted the movement of its 
splendid life. Only dead things can be dissected. 
You can never dissect your Apollo and find the glory 
of his being. Divide Venus into muscles and mem- 
branes, and you have lost her. We must come to 
Nature, when we woo her, not with the student's 
critical analysis, but with the ardor of the lover, if 
we would learn her secrets and feel the pressure of 
her throbbing life. Not that the student's analysis 
is, in itself, unwise ; but it is incomplete. This 
surely is Yorick's skull, but unless you put back the 
quips and cranks, you have not Yorick here. Caesar 
turned to clay was Csesar still, but there was something 
that defied analysis, and that something ruled the 
world. Nature, like God, refuses to be analyzed. 
Not by searching shall she be revealed. Your micro- 



THE HARDEST OF A QUIET EYE. 43 

scopes are blinds, not windows; and in attempting 
to find Nature by dissections you miss her, like those 
of whom Lowell speaks, who " cannot see their for- 
ests for their trees." 

We cannot tell the things that we have harvested 
on this summer day in these woods of Maybrook. 
Why, the whole beauty of the world is here ! Our 
friends who wished to see the wonders of the earth 
pitied us, no doubt, when they crossed the sea. But 
we are pitying them to-day. Why were they not 
wise enough to know that we need not go up and 
down the earth to find its beauty ? Shakespeare sat 
down in the field beside his native stream, and the 
world brought its beauty to him. Wherever there is 
an eye to see, there the fairies come and dance. 

The crowds are at Paris, but we have cooler shades 
and larger visions here, in these woods at Maybrook. 
There are clever weavings there, but there are 
finer weavings here in the gossamer that makes the 
spider's bridge between the leaves. There are carv- 
ings in the Parisian bazaars ; but will the chalets of 
Switzerland show anything to equal the curling crests 
of the tiny wavelets in this mountain brook? How 
crude is the lace-like silver work of Milan compared 
with these birchen trees '^ clothed in white samite " ! 
These cloud draperies, these pendent vines, are 
richer than the sheen of Lyons' silk and the Gobe- 
lin tapestries. The stars on which we shall look 



44 1VAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

to-night will outnumber the lamps of the Rue de 
Rivoli ; and the palaces of Versailles will not reveal 
such frescos as these that are over us in the twin- 
ing branches of these forest shades of Maybrook. 
Indeed, we pity, to-day, our friends who, with gaping 
wonder, are staring at the Luxor column. How 
modern it is ! Why, those figures on it are only of 
the yesterdays of two thousand years ago ! Come 
here to Maybrook and see something old ! These 
rocks and ledges are as old as the earth, and these 
messages of the wrinkled rocks were ages old when 
Egypt lay untenanted beside the Nile. For our 
Notre Dame we have these larger aisles of God's 
first temples ; for our Eiffel Tower we have the hills, 
"rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun;" for our 
Louvre we have the larger masterpieces of sun and 
cloud, the forest and the brook ; and the meanest 
weed or flower we have at Maybrook shames the 
rarest handiwork of all the exhibitors at Paris. Do 
not pity us, poor globe-trotters. We are pitying 
you. 

We wonder if, when those who have hunted round 
the world in search of beauty come home again, they 
will still be able to enjoy the beauty that is in humble 
things; if those who have seen Vesuvius still can 
love to see the smoke rise up from the chimney of 
a humble home ! Beauty is not at all a thing of 
measurements, and no genuine love of beauty will 






/H .^ ^'ti 



THE HARVEST OF A QUIET EYE. 47 

permit wonder at the great to destroy love for the 
sweet simpUcity of common things. The Alps have 
been enemies, not friends, if they have wooed our 
heart from Monadnock and Kearsarge. Monadnock 
is unkind if it changes the pasture slope of the hill 
that is part of the old farm into something common 
and neglected. Beauty is not a thing of rivalries. 
Its language is broken into no dialects ; it is a univer- 
sal speech. He who loves Nature, loves her in all 
her vestures ; her royal draperies only make us 
welcome the homespun garments of common life, as 
the glories of the Alps educate the Swiss cottagers to 
fill their windows with delicate flowers. The true 
lover of Nature not only can feel the great throb of 
the river flowing to the sea, the stir of its cities, the 
might of its commerce, but also the splendor of the 
fields and flowers through which it flows, the beauty 
of the primrose by the river's brim. Wordsworth was 
one of the truest lovers that Nature ever had. But 
her ordinary life was not made unattractive by her 
larger splendors, and though he said : — 

" The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite." 

Yet so does love, like the sea, fill places infinitely 

large and small, that he also confessed that — 

" To me the meanest flower that blows, can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 



48 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

There is in this unity of beauty a revelation of 
higher things. The wonders of Nature reveal the 
power and majesty of Him who rideth upon the wings 
of the wind ; but the lesser beauties, which lie in the 
gateways of our own homes, which are all around us 
in these Maybrook woods, speak of the Love which 
is acquainted with us in all our ways. For us, at 
least, as we sit here in these woods, and gather " the 
harvest of a quiet eye," we have ready our choice, 
if we must make election, between the greater or the 
lesser beauty of the world. Let Alps and Apennines 
be blotted out, we shall keep our little mounts of 
vision, the pasture slope fragrant with the breath of 
childhood. Silence Niagara's roar, but leave for us 
the music of the brook within our familiar woods. 
We can live without the marshallings of armies, the 
pomps and pavilioned splendors of life ; but life 
cannot be lived without its homely joys, the sweet 
domesticities of friendship. We can spare the king's 
proclamations better than the lover's whisperings. 
When Nature speaks to us it is not with mouthings 
of great words, but in the heart's simplest language ; 
and when God wishes to reveal the inmost secrets of 
his providence, he cries not from the mountains, but 
walks with man in the silences of the cool of the day, 
speaking not with the thunder but with the voice that 
has stillness. 

And yet, as the grass in the meadows of Maybrook, 



THE HARJ/EST OF A QUIET EYE. 49 

where the other harvesters are working, is tough to 
the dull scythe, so in these higher harvestings of 
beauty, the crops are gathered best by him who 
brings to the gathering the best implements and the 
largest zeal. The field of beauty is a thing of visions ; 
and to read the soul of Nature, we must bring the 
inner vision of a soul attuned to her. The old prov- 
erb tells us to " put love within the heart and it 
shall add a precious seeing to the eye ; " and, after all, 
it is not only love that makes the world go round, it is 
love that can best interpret the causes and the issues 
of its revolutions. 

So the hours have speeded, while we have been 
gathering the crops that grow in Maybrook's woods. 
The other workers in the lower fields can bring their 
harvestings in loaded wagons to the barns, but we go 
back from our toilings without a wheel to carry our 
spoils. Yet who shall say that for the needs of life, 
its sustenance and growth, the woods of Maybrook 
do not gxow as rich a harvest as its meadows? 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 

TT 7E suppose that his real name is Peter, but he 
^ ^ is ahvays called Pete. It is hardly possible 
that any of our readers ever saw him, for he has sel- 
dom been away from home, and is only visible in 
summer, as he freezes up in winter like other hiber- 
nating creatures. 

Of course we mean " Pete the carpenter." Like 
many other discoveries that have been of service to 
the world, his origin is mythical : he claims to be of 
French extraction, and it is probable that he drifted 
over from the Canadian shore in the glacial period ; at 
any rate, he is here, as much a part of the scenery of 
Summerland as the rocks and trees. Men may come 
and men may go, but Pete stays on forever. In the 
old country he would be called a factotum ; in dra- 
matic parlance, a genera' utihty man; ni Masonic 
phrase, a permanent jewel; but to us he is simply 
" Pete the carpenter." 

None of us knows his antecedents and none knows 
his destiny, except that he will last as long as there is 
a board to saw or a nail to drive in Summerland. 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 51 

When falls the world, then falls the island ; and when 
the island falls, then falls Pete. His age is as uncer- 
tain as that of a maid gone thirty. There is no way 
of arriving at it, as we cannot cut him open like a 
tree to count the rings, nor make him open his mouth 
like a horse that we may inspect his teeth. He is one 
of those peculiar fellows whose age does not register 
itself. We have many such, who might be thirty or 
three hundred. Pete is such a one. In personal 
appearance he is hardly an Apollo, but then for that 
matter there are few of us who are. He is short in 
stature, with eyes set together like those of a squirrel. 
His legs are short, and were they put together upon 
the printed page, would be taken for a parenthesis. 
He has the gift of silence, but keeps ready answer 
for every question ; and altogether he has a merry 
heart, and is as nimble in his wit as with his hands. 

We do not know how it ever happened that he 
became a carpenter. In our confidential talks he has 
never told us where or when he learned his trade ; we 
do not think he ever learned it, but nevertheless he 
has some of the elements of genius with a saw and 
plane. He can fit boards to any angle, and drive 
a nail at any inclination, can use his eye for a tape- 
line, and make a joint without a mortise-board. He 
can shake two boards together and make a closet in 
the twinkling of an eye, go over the rafters of a build- 
ing like a cat, and can never be put to shame by any 



52 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

mechanical task, however impossible it may seem to 
other men. It is said of him, moreover, that he con- 
sumes his own shavings like one of the modern smoke- 
devouring engines, though we do not stake our repu- 
tation on the truth of this assertion. We know at 
least that he has other diet than his chips, for he 
uncovers his pail at high noon by the standard time, 
and rarely runs beyond the vespers for his tea. 

He is also semi-amphibious, and can make a crib or 
repair a dock as well under water as on its surface, 
while with a boat he is master and can sail straight to 
his home with the wind in any quarter. The other 
day he carried us to the village, three miles away. 
The waves were foam-crested and the wind was high 
and boisterous ; but our trust in him was unfaltering, 
and when he invited us into the cockle-shell which 
serves him for a boat, we went without a single 
fear. The sail was fitted to its place, and we went 
with the wind. There was no rudder, and he dis- 
dained the use of an oar, but by some mysterious 
skill steered his boat by the sail-rope he held : now 
it was loose, now taut ; now he was on the seat, again 
upon the gunwale, again crouched on the bottom of 
the boat, but simply by his handling of the sail and 
his position in the boat, he shaped his course at will. 
Discovering at length that he was not steering by 
either oar or rudder, we asked him if he meant to tell 
us that he could carry us just where we wished to go 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 53 

without touching oar to water. Whereupon he sim- 
ply asked us where we wished to land. We told him 
where we would have it, and the wizard Pete sent 
his boat like an arrow from a Tartar's bow to the 
very spot, not even touching oar at the last to make 
the landing at the dock. 

This was the man that built our summer home. 
We do not know just why we built when we did, 
except that Pete was on the island and the other job 
he had was finished, and some law or fate ordained 
that it was our turn next. We had thought to break 
the thread of fate and demonstrate that some other 
could wield the saw and hammer on the island, and 
it was perhaps for such a purpose rather than ambi- 
tion for a larger house that we essayed to build. We 
know at least that we engaged another builder ; but 
the fates cannot be outwitted, and when the time 
for building came, there was Pete upon the rafters, 
so nimble-footed that we could not catch him and 
drive him off. We are not of that mulish kind of 
creature that cannot accept defeat ; and never asking 
whether he had bribed or killed the other workman, 
we surrendered to the conqueror, only asking that he 
mercifully treat us. We did not design to build a 
palace or even a house of imposing size. We are 
not ambitious, and there are limits to our fortune. 
Something small and cheap, which could be finished 
in half the vacation season, so that we might have the 



54 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

using of it : this is what we asked of Pete. There are 
builders we have seen, who, before they build, closet 
themselves with architects and have, in finest tracer- 
ies of india ink and other pigments, a plan of the 
building they will have. But Pete is the architect of 
his own buildings, — if not of his own fortune, — and 
is apt to be governed in his work by the length of the 
timbers and the condition of prospective jobs. So we 
paced off on the rocks where we would set the 
posts, and we made the framing according to some 
invisible plan of Pete's. 

There are many advantages in building a house 
upon an inhabited island. The lumber has to be 
transferred in scows, which afford fine opportunities 
for muscular development. Then there are neigh- 
bors who take a hand, not perhaps in carrying of 
boards, but in planning. Each one has his own 
peculiar views as to where the windows, doors, and 
partitions ought to be ; and where a builder is com- 
plaisant, and tries to please his friends, he is apt to 
have the pleasure of building half-a-dozen houses in 
getting one. We do not even wish to intimate that 
Pete the builder actually invited criticism that he 
might tear down to-day the work of yesterday. We 
only know that he was considered island property, and 
took his orders kindly from every source. 

Our doors and windows were of the migratory kind, 
here to-day, somewhere else to-morrow. We tried to 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 55 

please our friends, and so we shifted as the women 
wished. Of course we did not get along, but then we 
had lots of fun, and our friends and neighbors learned 
the elements of building at our expense. The fiction 
holds among our friends that we were the builder of 
our own house, but it is the veriest romance. We 
were only the puppet who sat upon the throne and 
paid the bills, while Pete was the autocrat behind the 
throne. 

So the vacation drifted on. At first the work 
seemed to go with speed, for there were other houses 
yet to build. But when the building of these was put 
off, then progress ceased. This workman failed to 
come, that one was sick, though we half suspect that 
Pete drowned them in the going or the coming. We 
begged our neighbors to build their houses as they 
had planned, telling them that Pete was like these 
chronic old lovers who are never off with the old love 
till they are on with the new, that they were richer 
than we and ought to help us out ; but they deserted 
us, and so the season drifted on, and Pete, like the 
blessed poor, threatened to be always with us. 

Every day we worked at the side of Pete. We 
laid the floors and made all sorts of impossible 
squares and diamonds in the lattice-work, which were 
readjusted afterward by Pete. We laid battens on 
cracks, and put shingles on roofs, while we watched 
the sawing of every board for shelves and closets and 



56 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

did no little work of the cabinet sort on the interior 
finishing. To be sure, we had often to call Pete when 
we were perplexed as to how to turn a joint for a 
corner bracket, and it is possible that we did not 
greatly expedite the work ; but then we showed our 
good intentions, and we worked for nothing. 

We did not at the outset intend to praise our- 
selves, for our cottage home is the handiwork of Pete, 
but the painting is our own. 

We had with us a friend, who lives with us in 
our island home, and is as the apple of our eye. 
Together we essayed to prime the building. We 
mixed our paint as best we could, with lead and oil, 
umbers, vermilions, yellows, and other colors, mak- 
ing a hue that pleased us well, though it was a color 
never seen on land or sea. 

So we painted ; but when the pot was empty, and 
we tried to duplicate the color, we had forgotten the 
combination, and though we tried with tears we could 
not bring it. Then the colors began one by one to be 
exhausted ; and when our work was finished, we had a 
house like Joseph's coat, ranging from richest olive to 
chocolate, mauve, lavender, old gold, peach-color, 
and a dark shade of white. We think the work must 
have been well done, for we understand that it at- 
tracted a good deal of attention. One of our neigh- 
bors said that in the fall, after we had left, they 
brought parties on excursion trains to see it. We 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 



57 



regret to say that we were the victim of that unfor- 
tunate trait in human nature which is never content 




to see success without envy. Our island home has 
many roofs of house and veranda, and we frescoed 



58 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

these with red. We did not claim that we were 
either the glass of fashion or the mould of form as we 
lay sprawled upon the roof. We were not arrayed 
perhaps as Solomon in all his glory ; but at least we 
did a job that has stood the test of snows and rains, 
and is not even now streaked over-much. Yet it has 
been asserted that instead of using brushes, we used 
to cHmb to the ridge-pole of the roof, upset the paint, 
and slide down in the torrent ; and for proof of it, 
our maligners claim that the streaks on the roof cor- 
respond in width to our own person. When we 
resent the accusation, they dare us to the measure- 
ment. We point to the brush we used, but they 
retort by pointing to the overalls we wore ; and we are 
pained to state that friends to whom we have related 
our grievance tell us that the overalls if not the facts 
are certainly against us. 

We did have one serious misadventure. The 
house has not a mortgage, but it has an ell. We 
were at work upon its roof. The ladder was long ; 
the roof was low. Of course the proper way to do 
was to go up the staging of the house, then climb to 
the staging on the roof and do our work. Now, if we 
could go a little above the lower staging we could 
step to the upper one, which thing we tried. But 
the law of gravitation was against us. The ladder 
tipped, and we came down. The fall was not great, 
but the fall of a man with a pot of red paint in his 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 59 

hand does not have to be great to be disastrous. 
The bulk of the paint went down our right arm ; it 
quietly turned the angles of elbow and shoulder and 
then gently percolated over our entire person. We 
could have easily doubled our income if we had con- 
sented to supersede the tattooed man in the greatest 
show on earth, for we were colored with a higher de- 
gree of art. There is nothing in the realm of Nature 
so absolutely cold as red metallic roofing paint. We 
know it. We would not have minded this little epi- 
sode ; we lost the paint, or rather we did not exactly 
lose it, — we had it, though not in just the place we had 
designed. We had on a red shirt in place of a white 
one, and we were not the first individual who had 
painted his person. But then there were below us 
half a score of loafers, ministers, island owners, and 
others, who had been making a practice of coming 
over and jeering at us. When they saw we were not 
killed they laughed as never mortals laughed before. 
They have described the incident with other embel- 
lishments than that afforded by the paint, and they 
hesitate to forget it as they ought. Fearing lest they 
may go to selling county rights, we give the plain, un- 
varnished tale, that our traducing may not enrich 
those who scoffed at us. 

Well, the season passed on, and the house was 
finished, Pete remaining with us to the last and 
bringing away his tools on the same steamer that 



6o IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

took our clothes. Two years passed on, the un- 
finished cottage with its polychromatic decorations 
being the wonder if not the admiration of all be- 
holders. At length on a certain night we reached 
the island coming from the east, and promptly next 
morning, at seven o'clock, Pete appeared, coming 
from the west. 

In our plannings for the finish we had set down a 
week of Pete, but a month is passed, and his kit of 
tools is still unmoved. Once at least on Saturday we 
discharged him, but on Monday morning he appeared 
with his new-washed apron ready for another week. 
He is at this writing working for the island ; but when 
the dock is finished, we expect he will return to us, as 
cats return to their old homes, — in fact, so long 
as Pete survives, we do not expect that we shall live 
in a finished house. But then he is an honest fellow, 
who gives good measure for his pay, and does his 
work in hearty, wholesome fashion, and never yet 
have we had reason to wish that we could see the 
last of him. He bears with all our failings, and 
rarely groans when we strike a nail with his freshly 
sharpened saws ; and a man who can bear such 
things has in him the possibility of sainthood. 

The house that Pete built, or that he is build- 
ing, is a little thing, but it is very dear to us, for it 
nestles beneath the great pine-tree, and is less than 
twenty feet away from the river's ripples. From its 



THE HOUSE THAT PETE BUILT. 6 1 

piazzas, islands are visible and great reaches of this 
stateliest of rivers; and already we have lived long 
enough within it to love its rooms, and to dream of 
it when the weary work of the great world presses 
sore upon us. Friendship has woven some of its 
garlands over it, and it has become dear to us with 
the sanctity that makes a house a home. As the 
years go on we shall hope to come to its grateful 
shelter ; but we do not expect, as we do not desire, 
ever to come when we shall not find awaiting us its 
architect and builder, Pete, ready not indeed to 
finish, but to continue the work of building. And 
not until some returning glacial drift shall carry him 
away, shall we ever expect that we can say our house 
is finished. 



OLD YEAR'S REVERIES. 




'T is the last night of 
the old year. The 
sound of hurrying 
feet within 
the street has 
ceased, for the 
night is wan- 
ing toward the 
hour which 
shall usher in the new day and the new year. The 
Sabbath preparation has been completed, and for a 
long time we have sat by our study-fire musing over 
the changes of the year. Its gayeties and friendships, 
its toils and victories, its seasons of effort and of 
rest, have all passed by, as though out of the fire 
that burns before us some magic hand had brought 
the relics of the past. We are not old in years, and 
not yet do we find our pleasures to be of the past ; 
the glad to-day is better than our yesterday, and the 
to-morrows that are coming will bring larger blessings 
than the past has wrought. And yet the old year's 
fading hours, by some necromancy of their own, 



OLD YEAR'S REVERIES. 63 

change in their retrospection the dream of youth 
into the memories of age. So to-night we have been 
Hving in the past, and if we have thought of the 
days that are to be, it has been with wonder as to 
what change and marvel they will bring. Not changes 
in the outward world, the swift surprises of its busi- 
ness or its life of trade and thought, but changes in 
the friendships of our lives, and the pleasant fellow- 
ships of being. We know not why it is that this 
last night of the year should bring around us thus the 
brooding memories of all the years of life. It is 
not because we have taken down from its familiar 
place the old and put up the new calendar ; nor is it 
because with idle sentiment we have been wont to 
esteem times and seasons. Every night closes an 
old year, and every day marks an epoch in many 
lives. But memory to-night has been unlocking all 
its stores, and revealing in the firelight the secrets of 
forgotten days. Old friends long gone have burn- 
ished recollection, and the fellowships of far-off 
days have stirred remembrance like music heard 
in dreams. 

For us, as yet, life ought to be a thing of antici- 
pations, for youth not yet is wholly past ; but when 
memory is our only guest, age is not a thing of years, 
and now to-night, when thought is wholly of the 
past, we can enter into sympathy with the old who 
live in the long ago. There has always been to us a 



64 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

deep significance in the splendid imagery of Moore, 
which pictures him communing with the old memories, 
as one who treads alone the deserted banquet-hall, 
the lights gone out, the garlands dead, nothing left 
but the relics of the past. So it seems to the old 
who live in the memory of departed days ; the earth 
is filled with farewells to the dying and mournings 
for the dead ; and to-night the invisible guests who 
keep silent fellowship with us, while the sands of the 
old year's life run out, stir the memories which we 
thought were long since dead beneath the ashes of 
the long, long years. 

We are creatures of our circumstances, and even 
our dreams are woven of our waking thoughts. It 
has been the "touch of a vanished hand" that has 
led us into retrospection ; and when once the door of 
garnered memories is opened, all the past marshals 
its remembered friends. We have been much among 
graves of late, and it was but yesterday that we laid 
away all that was mortal of one who was closely 
aUied to us in the bonds of friendship. We had 
known her for half her life, and not often is a life 
so radiant with loveliness. 

She was dowried with a beauty of which none was 
unconscious but herself, and the outward tabernacle 
fashioned in such grace was illumined ever by a 
bounding elasticity and mobility of life that fasci- 
nated by its radiance. Wherever she touched a life, 



OLD YEAR'S REVERIES. 65 

she gave the blessing that abundant joyousness of 
living brings, and acquaintance gave her admiration, 
and friendship love. 

Wherever she was, she was the magnet that drew 
all hearts, and even envy could not withhold the 
homage that her genuineness compelled. She used 
often to come and sit within this very room where 
we write to-night, bringing some message or office of 
friendship ; and when she had gone it seemed as if 
the windows had been opened and the breath of 
summer had entered, and the room was filled with 
the music of singing birds. Wherever one met her, — 
in the home, in the social gathering, in the street, — it 
was meeting the sunshine, for her life was light and 
warmth and love. She was full of high enthusiasms, 
and gave her heart without reserve to those she loved. 
There was something of idolatry in her affection for 
parents and the inmates of the old home ; and to 
praise her husband or children was to make her 
face kindle with very ecstasy of pride. She carried 
into womanhood the artlessness of the girl ; and the 
merry laughter of her childhood, which was like the 
breath of heaven to the weary-hearted, was the music 
with which she charmed her babes. Her friends 
could not easily learn to call her by other than her 
maiden name. When marriage came, the new name 
was added, yet we called her by the old one too. 
But all the seasons pass ; and this bright life, which 
5 



66 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

like a summer's day was crowned with the brightness 
of the sun, the music of the birds, the colors of the 
flowers, passed on. And so we buried her, and the 
flowers among which she rested before the altar 
where she had stood as a bride were not more 
beautiful than was the outward form whose loveli- 
ness death had not marred. 

There are some who say that when the spirits are 
set free they go not far away from the friends they 
loved upon the earth. " Behold, we know not any- 
thing ! " But in these fading hours of the old year's 
life it seems as if there sat before us here this one 
who is numbered among the saints in glory. We have 
no vision that we can see her, but as sleepers waken 
from unconsciousness when friends stand over them, 
we somehow feel that we are not alone as we watch 
the old year out beside our study-fire. There are 
others here with us, — friends on whose graves the 
flowers have turned brown, but who went away so 
little time ago that the blessed anointings which time 
gives, have not yet changed the poignancy of a new 
grief into " pleasant recollections." There are none 
who are yet apparelled in the flesh who are with us in 
our musings here. These are all of those who have 
gone on into the hfe where the years have no end ; 
and whether it is memory that brings them near or 
the longing for the renewal of companionship, we 
feel that the very place is hallowed as though it were 



OLD YEAR'S REI^ERIES. 6/ 

filled with the forms of angels. Within us there stirs 
a dim and tremulous thought, that if the spirit could 
only see eye to eye we might behold our room act- 
ually tenanted this night with those with whom once 
we walked in friendship on the earth. So are we 
conscious of companionship while yet we sit alone, 
that did we make passage from the old to the new 
year, as we cross rivers from shore to shore, we would 
gladly say, — 

" Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee, 
Take, I give it willingly ; 
For, invisible to thee, 
Spirits twain have crossed with me." 

What are not these last hours of the old year 
witnessing? The merchant is busy beneath the gas- 
light with his ledgers, balancing the gains and losses 
of the year. Watchers beside the sick, with appre- 
hension born of fear, and a questioning that dares 
not frame itself into words, wonder if when the new 
year shall become old the imperilled loved one will 
yet be with them in the flesh. Mothers are whisper- 
ing their prayers beside the cradle of their babes, 
and love is weaving its protections about those who 
sleep, unconscious of the thoughts that guard them. 
And not a few are in communion with those who 
have passed on since the year was young. The mid- 
night air is vocal with their speech, and vision is 
bright with their remembered forms. They sing 



68 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the old songs, their laughter cheers, the brightness of 
their presence is around us, and the place where 
we sit in meditation is made holy ground, as on 
a winter's day our room is freshened by the exhil- 
arating air brought in the garments of our visitors. 
How many friends esteemed have sat here with us 
during the changes of the year, but never such a 
royal company as this that watches with us the old 
year out. For memory has a clever alchemy that 
blinds vision to unpleasant things ; and not the 
least of the blessed ministries of death is the power 
it has to turn around the frailties of friends, and 
show the virtues hidden on the other side. And so 
the year has kept for us its sweetest lesson for the 
last. Memory does not cherish the dreams but the 
realities of life ; and if the friends that we have loved 
had ceased to be, our hearts would not be cheated 
into cheerfulness by their remembrance. The flowers 
that live twine themselves into no wreaths for the 
blossoms that have fallen, the beasts build no monu- 
ments and have no commemorations for their dead, 
and the very care with which we cherish the poor dust 
that apparelled the spirits we love, bears witness to 
our instinct for immortality. We touch the inner 
life through the outward form, and memory cherishes 
the place of burial, form and feature, speech and 
deed, because it feels that life is still alive, and beyond 
death there is the living soul. 



OLD YEAR'S REVERIES. 69 

To-morrow you may come with your scepticisms 
of life beyond, and we will answer your doubts with 
our little logics ; but to-night where is there room for 
scoffing doubt to sit with us, when out of the mys- 
terious silence the immortals have come back to hang 
memory with garlands and fill our room with their 
radiant presence ? It is a cruel hand that will de- 
stroy even a child's bright dream, and all of us are 
sad when the fairies cease to dance in the visions 
of our children. It cannot be that God, who sat- 
isfiest the desire of every living thing, would keep 
alive forever this yearning for continued life, place 
in the human heart the hunger for immortality, invest 
the soul with the elemental instinct for life, and 
doom us to nothing else than dust to dust ! But 
mere continuance of being is not the measure of 
our dreams. It is that we shall have identity of life, 
consciousness, memory of the past, its friendships 
and its loves : that the broken threads of fellowship 
shall be woven again together, and we shall let our 
life drift on beside the currents that mingle with it 
here. The power that makes us conscious of our- 
selves makes us conscious of those about us ; and 
unless eternity means recognition and reunion, it 
means unconsciousness, and this is only another 
word for annihilation. 

It was only two nights ago that we looked down 
on the tranquil face of the friend that all our hearts 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



esteemed. The lifelong smile was gone, and the 
beauty that had won so many hearts missed the 
illumination that had made it a thing of fascination. 
And yet we whispered to ourselves, " There is the 
certitude of our immortality." For where in all 
the universe is there such waste as this would be, if 
such loveliness and grace of life, the sunshine and 
the music, the brightness and glory of life, these 
precious things which are infinitely more costly than 
Nature's richest distillations, have come to their 
final end? 

So passes out with us the old year, not in laments 
but in rejoicings, not in sorrow for the dead but in 
joy for the living, not in sadness at separations but 
in gratitude for unchanging friendships. We wear 
our outward life as a mask that hides us from each 
other ; and until the com of wheat falls into the 
ground and dies, it abideth alone. Death removes 
the barriers between the living, and when spirits are 
unclothed they see eye to eye. The life that is, at 
this dying hour of the old year, for not a few of us 
is not perhaps what it was when the year was new ; 
but the life that is to be has larger allurements and is 
a sweeter thing than once it seemed. 

In the old patrician houses there was one door 
which was never opened except when the dead were 
carried forth to burial. This old year's night for us 
has opened the door, and back again have come with 



OLD YEAR'S REVERIES. 71 

joy the friends who went in tears, and with the music 
of their speech and the brightness of their presence 
they have revealed to us the secret that death is only 
a process in the way of life. 

So let the old years go and the new years come ! 
What matters it, since life goes on and on ! Love 
is sovereign alike in all the world ; and if we may 
sorrow at the old fashion of death, we may rejoice at 
the older fashion of our immortality. Thus we may 
take up the new year's march, as those who know 
that the way they tread leads them at last to the 
city that hath foundations whose maker and builder 
is God. 



AN EVENING WITH THE NEGROES. 

ON Liberty Street, in New Orleans, there is a 
church called Wesleyan Chapel, where the 
primitive negroes hold the old doctrines after the 
manner of their fathers. The street has narrow side- 
walks, and is poorly lighted. A bell, not larger than 
that of a locomotive, from the stubby belfry was 
calling the sable saints to worship ; and a large audi- 
ence was present. We were inclined to be modest 
in our desires and to sit near the door, so that if 
occasion called we could easily retire ; but the sexton 
insisted that we should come up among the "quality," 
and did not bring us to anchorage until we were 
seated on the anxious seats, with nothing between us 
and the platform but the chancel rail. The building 
was of fair size, with box-like galleries and square 
pews ; a stove was in the middle of the building ; and 
in the rear, around a parlor organ, was a choir of 
voluminous dimensions. The congregation was a free- 
and-easy one. The older dames and gossips were 
going from seat to seat in Httle visitings ; the young 
people were chatting ; and it seemed as though we 



AN EVENING IVITH THE NEGROES. 



n 



had intruded on a colored picnic, so was the buzzing 
of a hundred visitors apparent all around us. People 
came in with baskets, little satchels, umbrellas, and 
packages, which they put around the platform in the 
freest manner possible. Mothers brought their chil- 
dren and placed them on the kneeling step before 
the chancel rail, until the whole was lined with these 
black blossoms. It was a most uncomfortable seat ; 
and as the service progressed, one by one they nodded, 
toppled, and fell over on the step, seeing which the 
mothers would step out, put a faded shawl beneath 
their heads, and leave them to their slumbers. 

Soon there was a sudden hush, and a large-sized 
man bustled in, and went upon the platform. Turning 
to his audience, he said, '' Sing, sing ! don't talk when 
you come into church, but sing. I like to have you 
sing." The talking ceased ; and an old half- blind 
negro, sitting in the side seats, with his coat tied 
together with a white string, started a plaintive hymn. 
The audience caught it up, and with wonderful mel- 
ody the music was rendered. Silence followed, but 
only for a moment, for a woman's voice with weird 
effect began another hymn ; for a moment she sang 
alone, then another voice joined, and still another, 
until, with an effect that was indescribable, the whole 
audience was singing a wild, melancholy air, — an old 
slave songj that might have been wrung out of the 
heart of bondage. There was no lack of music ; song 



74 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

succeeded song, all of them strange to our Northern 
ears, but of such tender melody as more than once 
bid the tears come to our eyes. 

The hour had come for service ; and the pastor 
rose and read a hymn, deaconing it off in the olden 
style. It was sung well, but it was evident that the 
favorite music was not written in the hymn-book. 
The sermon was on the text, " Now are we the sons 
of God," with emphasis on the word "now." We 
were originally children of wrath, but by adoption we 
have become children of God. The discourse was 
not without ability. It was ingenious in design and 
admirably adapted to the audience. He described 
the apostle as sitting by the shore of the " Ugene 
Sea," had much to say of " Abby Father," was 
inclined to make predatory excursions against the 
Baptists, and evidently was not tinctured with the 
New Theology heresy. It was really refreshing to 
hear the old-time doctrines in their unameliorated 
depravity ; to hear the descriptions of a hell that had 
some burn to it. But the most lurid descriptions of 
hell fell on unheeding ears, while the glories of 
heaven created a perfect fusillade of hallelujahs ! 

A few of the quaint remarks of the preacher linger 
in the memory : — 

" Some men say that some are elected to be saved, and 
some are elected to go to hell. I don't preach no such 
stuff as that. ... A faith like that ain't worth a puck- 



AN EVENING IVITH THE NEGROES. 75 

horn ; it is like the old man's rabbit, — some one cut off a 
piece, and the old man thought that it had shrunk. We 
don't want no such shrinking faith as that ! . . . Religion 
without principle ain't worth a hill of beans. , . . You 
have got to be busy in heaven. Even the arkies and 
the high arkies all say, glory, glory, glory ! . . . There 
are different kinds of Christians. There is the Sunday 
Christian, with a soul the size of a chick-a-dee ; another 
who doesn't pray. If he does pray, he is as lazy about 
it as the man who put in his provisions for the year, his 
ham and bacon, and then went in and said grace on the 
whole year's stock. Another has a soul so small that if 
you poured grace into it, it would n't rattle. Some men 
are so small that, when they shout hallelujah, their voice 
is such a little squeaky thing it would n't be heard round 
the corner on Glorification Street. I like these great 
souls, so big that when they get to heaven the rustling 
of their wings shakes the streets of the golden city." 

The sermon was one of great power, with touches of 
rude eloquence, warmed with humor and quaint wit, 
which kept the people alert and earnest. The audi- 
ence was responsive to every mood of the preacher, 
and a running commentary was kept up. If the 
minister said, " You can't do so and so," the response 
came, " 'Course you can't," " The idea, no ! no ! " 
" I guess not," " You 're right," and similar phrases ; 
while " glory," " hallelujah," " bress de Lord," from 
the beginning to the end, punctuated almost every 
sentence of the preacher. Early in the service the 
"power" began to work. In the prayer we were 
startled by a most unearthly shriek in the centre of 



^6 WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the house. We supposed that some one had been 
stabbed ; but seeing no commotion we thought that 
perhaps it was a custom of the country, and really, in 
the excess of negro population, a man or two less 
did not matter. But shortly after, across the aisle 
from us there came such a sound as we had never 
heard ; it was a mixture of squeal, shriek, and squawk, 
in about equal parts. We almost jumped from our 
seat in fright, turned, and saw a cross-eyed negro girl 
lying upon the seat, kicking for dear life, with hands 
clawing in most alarming proximity to us, bonnet off, 
eyes rolling, body becoming rigid, while with jerky 
ejaculations, she exclaimed, " Bress de Lord ! I got 
de power." Other sisters were trying to bend her 
back into shape ; but she was enjoying it too much 
to yield readily to treatment. Even then it did not 
dawn upon us that this was the common method 
of negro worship. And while we were wondering 
whether with the next lurch the power might not land 
her in our arms, the preacher looked down upon us, 
and smiling said, "Don't be alarmed; it isn't any- 
thing, — she is only happy." It was very assuring, and 
doubtless stated the condition of her mind ; but it did 
not give adequate description of our feelings. Well, 
this was only one of many incidents of like character 
during that eventful service. At its conclusion the 
collection was in order. The trustees filed into the 
chancel, and with baskets in hand addressed the 



AN El^ENlNG IVITH THE NEGROES. yy 

audience. Putting the baskets then upon the table, 
they called for the friends to rally. Meantime the 
singing was resumed, — the same strange, weird songs, 
each having a refrain. There was a peculiar, swing- 
ing motion to the songs, that made it seem as though, 
if one should only launch upon them, he could swing 
to and fro all day. 

One particularly had this motion. We could not 
catch the words, but the beginning of the swing took 
place on ''A dying thief rejoiced ; " and with this they 
swung to and fro. Another really delightful melody 
was, '' I want to be ready when the Bridegroom 
comes ! " As the songs went on, the stragglers, one 
by one, walked up to the chancel and put in their 
contributions, the deacons making change in the 
most business-like manner. The singing waxed warm 
as the moments flew past ; and at last the master- 
piece of song was rendered in " Come where the 
billows roll. I 've been redeemed ; I never mean to 
die no more." The sentiment of the hymn and the 
chorus-like movement were inspiring. By the time 
they had got into the middle of it, about the twentieth 
verse, we found ourselves singing with the rest of 
them ; and at last, in we trust harmonious unison 
with the defective-eyed girl across the aisle, we our- 
selves were singing, " Roll, billows, roll," with all the 
unction if not the music of the best of them. At the 
conclusion of the hymn, the blackest-looking officer 



78 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

in the group behind the chancel rail exclaimed, 
" Well, breddren, dem billows roll just beautiful ; but 
I notice dat de nickels ain't rollin' into dese baskets 
very much. Come, breddren, keep de ark a-movin'. 
Give us nudder song." 

We almost impoverished ourselves in trying to help 
the deacons out. We sent up our nickels by the 
children ; and every time we made a motion toward 
our pocket some observant brother would grab a 
basket and hand it to us. Then the sisters went 
among the people, and this took another subsidy. 
The ultimatum was finally given that the service could 
not be concluded until five more nickels were given, 
to make even money. The nickel seemed to be the 
multiple of value. We waited, but no one responding, 
we took our last quarter and shied it over the chancel 
rail ; and in summing up our donations, we found that 
the evening service had cost us about the price of a 
good opera ticket. But then no opera ever gave so 
much for so small a fee. 

The last scene in the service was a baptism. The 
minister introduced the ordinance with a general scold- 
ing on the impropriety of bringing children to be bap- 
tized at the evening meeting, and gave emphatic 
notice that the thing must end. " Well, now," he 
said, ''bring up de baby." The procession started, — 
a young woman with a child, and an old woman with 
a boy. With a prefatory sermon on baptism, with a 



AN EVENING IVITH THE NEGROES. 79 

spiteful hit or two at the Baptists, the preacher took the 
child and sprinkled the water on it. The little one 
yelled with vigor, when the minister, by way of bene- 
diction, shouted, " May dis child grow up to be a 
good woman, and hate de Debil as it hates water." 
The charge to the mother was elaborate, for in it he 
rebuked the sins of the people. He charged her to 
bring the child to church, and vented his scorn on his 
people for their dereliction in this regard. On the 
subject of education he said, " Educate dis child ; it 
better hab only one shirt to its back, and go to bed 
while it is being washed, dan to grow up wid a head 
as empty as an old gourd widout any seeds." So he 
exhorted the mother. Finally, turning to the god- 
mother, he said, " Now, as de godmudder of dis 
chile, if dis mudder dies, you are to do de tings 1 
hab charged de mudder to do." At this stage from 
the audience rang out the cry, '' She ain't de mudder 
of dat chile ! " " She ain't de mudder of dat chile ; 
who is de mudder of dat chile?" said the preacher. 
" Dere she is over in dat pew." " Are you de 
mudder of dis chile? Why don't you come out here? 
Are you 'shamed to be de mudder of dis chile?" 
" No, I ain't 'shamed," said a comely woman, as she 
came out and took her place at the chancel rail. 
The minister had charged the wrong woman. The 
evening was getting late ; the exhortation could not 
be repeated ; and so with such grace as he could 



8o IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

command, he transferred the admonitions. Turning 
to the boy, he said, " What is de name of dis 
boy?" *'He ain't going to be baptized; he is de 
godfader," was the answer. " He de godfader ! " 
saia the preacher ; " he ain't big enough to be a god- 
fader, he doesn't know de obhgations. Well, well, 
it is too late now ; but grow up, grow up quick, little 
godfader, and run to Jesus and get into de kingdom 
ob heben." So ended the strange christening service. 
We can only give it in faintest outline, and can- 
not picture the surroundings, — the quaintly dressed 
people, the constant ejaculations, the moving to and 
fro, the quaintly humorous manner of the preacher, 
the intent interest of the great assembly. As the 
meeting dissolved, the elders and preachers gathered 
round us, while the sisters of the church came up and 
asked us who we were. We were of course a little 
flattered, and think that perhaps our fine work on the 
chorus of the " Roll, billows, roll," had not escaped 
their notice, though the " other half," as we walked 
homeward, was mean enough to say, " Don't flatter 
yourself that it was your singing that gave you the 
attention of those old women ; it was the quarters 
that you gave that did the business." At any rate, 
we went to our furnished lodgings with the comforting 
assurance that when our Northern parish shall put us 
out, it is probable that the saints of Liberty Street 
will take us in. 



RUNNING THE GAUNTLET OF TFE 
''ISMS." 

IT was my misfortune to be born in New England 
in its era of ''isms." I never knew the philoso- 
phy of the law by which the star of empire moves 
westward, but have noticed that epidemics some- 
how follow the same course, and that the world's 
"isms" drift from the east in the path of shifting 
populations. Some writer tells of coming north on 
the advancing tide of blossoms, travelling with the 
movement of the season, and reaching every place at 
the same time as the flowers. I have lived a some- 
what migratory hfe, and have seemed to drift with 
the "isms." The affliction of a new ''ism" upon a 
community has somehow been coincident with the 
affliction of my own residence there ; and when the 
delusion has spent its force and passed on to pastures 
new, somehow I have been breaking camp at the same 
time. 

De Quincey cleverly tells how the traveller's trunk, 

by the labels which it bears, reveals the progress of 

his journey; and in the various residences of one 

who had the misfortune not only to be a minister but 

6 



82 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



a minister's son, and consequently to live always in 
"the drift period," I can almost to a day date the 
breaking out of every " ism " that has afflicted the New 
England and Middle States for the last thirty years. 

I came into the world by the way of the Kennebec 
River, to find the whole down-east population running 
mad over the "cold-water cure." In almost every 
house there was built ni the breeziest corner of the 
woodshed, or in the north side of the house, a kind 
of torture closet, whose floor was perforated for the 
free passage of the wind, and whose ceiling was cov- 
ered with a large tin vessel with a kind of watering- 
pot attachment worked with a string. 

The springs of Maine are not thermal. The legend 
exists that water fteezes there the year round, and 
that the Knickerbocker Company saws ice on the 
Kennebec during every month. 

Well, these perforated pans would be filled with 
this untempered water ; and human beings in whom 
the love of life was supposed to be strong would 
with their own hands bring down upon their heads 
a thousand torturing streams, deluding themselves 
the while with the thought that this was a panacea 
for every human ill. In reading from time to time 
reports of prison management I have noticed that 
the shower-bath treatment, in the more barbarous 
States, is in great favor for punishing refractory 
criminals. It was not possible in large families to 



RUNNING THE GAUNTLET OF THE ''ISMS" 83 

keep the children all the time in the shower-bath, 
but for the little intervals between the pulling of 
the string, there was the " wet sheet " and the 
'' compress." 

I was literally cradled in a bath-tub, and brought 
up in a shower-bath. My croups were crushed with 
a compress, and my colds frightened out of me with 
the horrors of a " wet sheet." I candidly believe 
that I was cheated out of half the ailments which 
are esteemed one of the perquisites of childhood by 
the ever-present spectre of the "cold-water cure." 

I have sometimes wondered what I might not have 
accomplished, if I had not sweated out half my 
energy in the compresses of my boyhood days, and 
have always been ready to palliate my shortcomings 
by asking, " What could be expected of one shaken 
into the world from a wet sheet ; whose brain was 
flattened in a shower-bath ; who was brought up by 
water-power?" I have been able somewhat to soften 
my mortification at the humiliations of my native 
State by the thought that those who are now its 
arbiters were, a generation ago, the subjects of the 
cold-water cure. It is not strange that some of its 
victims should show its effects in the idiocy of later 
Hfe. 

I graduated out of the shower-bath into the age of 
" Graham," — a kind of unleavened-bread period, in 
which men tried to live on sawdust and grow strong 
by starvation. 



84 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

The period is not one whose remembrances are 
kept fresh by frequency of recollection ; but the 
vision that vaguely and indistinctly haunts my mind 
is that of long-haired men and short-haired women, 
sallow of face, with lean and hungry looks, like mac- 
erated saints, the growth of whose heads was all on 
the outside. 

I wait with impatience the advent of the modern 
Buckle, who shall give us the philosophy of the law 
which links together hair and reform. To see the 
unkempt bangs of a female tramp, or the flowing 
locks of a masculine interrupter of our peace, is to 
see a reformer who wishes to convert us to some 
new delusion, and in the mean time would like to 
negotiate a temporary loan. If the literalism of art, 
now so much in vogue, shall continue, the philosophic 
artist of the future will need to paint Luther with the 
long hair of Absalom, and to make Garrison a fac- 
simile of the Spartan soldiers whom Xerxes saw 
combing their tresses in the pass of Thermopylae. 

The Modern Life Insurance Company is now the 
asylum of those of the clergy who find that they have 
mistaken their calling, or of whom the church is not 
worthy ; but in the days of my youth, the " isms" 
furnished inviting shelter. Magnetism, biology, psy- 
chology, and all " ologies " save theology had wonder- 
ful fascination for these genial visionaries ; and when 
phrenology burst like a meteor on New England, from 



RUNNING THE GAUNTLET OF THE ''ISMS." 85 

the ranks of the ministry came forth many apostles of 
the new gospel of bumps. 

In those days the parsonage was a free hotel for 
the brethren; and my feet were blistered by the 
errands of the visiting lecturers, while I have always 
half attributed my fall into public life to my intro- 
duction on the platform as a subject in those phreno- 
logical days. My wonder has not yet abated at the 
exceeding volubility of those peripatetic ex-minister 
lecturers. The little plaster heads were always amus- 
ing ; and it was doubtless from these things that I got 
the belief that the brain was a kind of chest of 
drawers containing each a faculty, and the bumps 
were a sort of labelled knot which pulled them out. 
My confidence was gready shaken when one of these 
fellows, in going over my head, uttered the alarming 
prophecy that I should one day be a minister ; and 
so, while I had noticed that it was seldom that any 
two told the same story, fearing that by some mis- 
adventure the dreadful intelligence might be con- 
firmed, I thereafter kept my head out of their hands, 
though, by compulsion, my legs were still at their 
disposal. 

I had one bump that was a perfect Waterloo for 
these fellows. They used to build up every imagi- 
nable career on the foundation of that innocent pro- 
tuberance. Delineators of pessimistic tendencies 
found it the basis of all the crimes, and the sunny 



86 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

optimists saw in it the credentials of my canonization. 
It never, however, staggered the brethren or failed to 
receive a name. It was of course a wicked thing to 
say, but the love of truth was strong with me in those 
days, and perhaps, too, to please the boys, I used to 
remark, "That bump is where a horse kicked me 
when I was six years old," — which was a fact, though 
by no means to be mentioned in that presence. 

I suppose it was largely because I had a kind of 
constitutional aversion to liquors of every kind that 
I became zealous in the flourishing temperance organ- 
ization in the little Cape Ann village, which had 
never known a drunkard. The precocity of my tal- 
ents, together with the fact that the lodge of cadets to 
which I belonged had but few members, early gave 
me the position of " outside sentinel," — an office which 
I subsequently learned was of low rank. My duties 
were especially fitted to one of active temperament, 
consisting largely in knocking my heels together out- 
side in the cold, announcing all comers through a 
knot-hole in the door with a slide over it, and then 
by a kind of antiphonal knocking, sliding in the 
brother and leaving myself alone at the head of the 
windy stairs. We used to meet over an engine-house, 
just in front of a graveyard, and were " great on 
receptions," to which we used to invite the girls. 
The older boys liked it, but it was a kind of bore to 
us younger ones, because we disliked to ask the girls 



--.^^ 







RUNNING THE GAUNTLET OF THE "/5M5." 89 

and were afraid to come home alone after the recep- 
tions were over, and the young misses were set down 
at their fathers' gates. 

We used to wear a kind of white regaUa, starched 
in the upper part, just where it bore upon the neck ; 
were ahvays strong on processions, and looked, I 
imagine, not greatly unlike the " Ancient Order of 
Hibernians," who seem to monopolize the parading 
business in these modern times. 

It does not become me to say how much the rav- 
ages of the monster Rum were lessened by our parades 
and picnics ; but I have no doubt our work was quite 
as effectual as much of the more pretentious temper- 
ance work of later times. 

The " Sugar Pill " epidemic came as a blessed 
reaction to those who had tortured themselves with 
hydropathy and starved themselves with Graham grits. 
I early was taught that homoeopathy was the lost 
Pleiad, the eighth wonder, the philosopher's stone 
and fountain of youth ; that arnica would heal every 
outward ill, and aconite exorcise every inward ill. I 
had a vague idea that somehow the future state of 
those who died under the old-school treatment was 
hardly as sure as might be desired, while to take the 
beautiful " similia-similibus " globules of the new 
school was to inherit the earth and outlive the 
patriarchs. 

It was an improvement on the compress ; and the 



90 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

mastication of a sugar pill, and the cautious smelling 
of a drop of the fifth reduction of a tincture in a bowl 
of water, was more to be desired than the felicities of 
a wet sheet. I was a ready convert ; and when the 
springtime came, and the little pills were substituted 
for the sulphur and molasses with which I had been 
wont to hail the flowers, I bore the change with that 
patient resignation which becomes those whose duty 
it is to obey. 

About this time I emerged from the old home 
nest ; and though I always avoid an argument with 
the old-school doctors, nevertheless, I take my sugar 
pills with thankfulness and with what faith I can com- 
mand, and trust the rest to Providence. 

For several years I lived in a community in Mas- 
sachusetts that was greatly stirred by the Spiritualism 
that sprang up on the heels of the Rochester Knock- 
ings. Come-outer-ism flourished greatly in that 
region, its disciples, as a rule, refraining from toil 
through the week, that they might ostentatiously 
labor upon the Sabbath. In the heart of Vermont, 
where a part of my school life was passed, I found 
myself among the Second Adventists, — a quiet, dreamy 
people, who seemed blighted with the fatal paralysis 
which this belief somehow seems to bring. I was too 
young to enter fully into the great strife of abolition- 
ism, but remember well how fervently devoted to this 
" ism " were those with whom I lived. As a boy I was 



RUNNING THE GAUNTLET OF THE "ISMS." 91 

taken to the great meetings of the day, and young as 
I was, learned from the Hps of Burhngame, Wilson, 
and others like them, the solemn meaning of the 
great struggle which was coming on. For years the 
"Liberator" was read with avidity, and many of 
those old events, the rendition of Burns and scenes 
of that kind, come up from early childhood like the 
phantom of a dream ; while not a few of the stirring 
words of those fateful days come from time to time, 
sounding out of the far-off past like the rallying blast 
of a brazen trumpet. In later days, I have become 
acquainted with the mind cure and faith cure, Chris- 
tian Science, and those multitudinous other systems 
which are mainly based on saying you are not sick, 
and sticking to it, when you know you are. But then, 
as Rudyard Kipling says, •' that is another story." 



A SHATTERED DREAM. 

I HAD fancied the thing from the start. Even the 
cumbersome three-wheelers that the boys used, 
I Hked ; and when, in the evolutionary process, the 
nickel-plated, ball-bearing Columbia came, one of 
the special dreams of a by no means visionary mind 
was to be the owner of a bicycle and ride up and 
down the world like other folks. To be sure, I am 
not quite the spry young fellow I used to be when I 
was the champion expert on the swings and bars, and 
pulled the stroke oar in the college boat. But still 
I am at least forty years away from the cane and 
crutch, and am vain enough to think that in wind and 
limb I need ask no odds of the younger generation. 
I have cherished the delusion, too, that I have quite 
the form for the saddle-perch of a nickel-plated 
wheel, and have been so favored by indulgent Na- 
ture that I should not suffer with the short-legged 
trousers of the wheelman's costume. 

There was something fascinating in the noiseless glid- 
ings of the rubber-tired wheels, while the maximum of 
speed at a minimum of labor was a condition that de- 



A SHATTERED DREAM. 93 

lighted. I had been a subscriber to the "Wheelman " 
from the start, and have fair knowledge of the long 
distance records. I have been a guest at the annual 
dinners of the clubs, and have kept my conscience 
clear at the festivities, with the knowledge that though 
the speech I made was poor, the fear of making it 
had saved the victuals of the club. To be a wheel- 
man and wear the shapely stockings was the dream 
and desire of my heart. But even dreams are sub- 
ject to amendment ; and when one night I picked up 
the victim of a " header," and helped straighten out 
his fractured nose, I concluded to add another wheel 
to the conveyance I would purchase, and would do 
my summer rambling with an anti-header tricycle in- 
stead of bicycle, for this was before the days of the 
modern " Safety " wheel. 

To this complexion had I come, when on my day 
of disenchantment the small boy of the household 
came in, and with such insinuating sophistries as the 
youngsters have when they have an axe to grind and 
wish the parental hand upon the crank, suggested 
that sire and son should take a turn, simply as a kind 
of breathing matter and to test the motion of the 
wheel. As I look back upon it now, I remember 
that I was somewhat muddled in the handling of the 
prophecy that was the subject of the morning's 
sermon ; and more to get rid of interruption than 
because of desire to make an exhibition, I gave 



94 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

consent, making stipulation that the place of my 
assignation with the wheel should be beyond the limits 
of the ward. 

In a jaunty making-call kind of walk, I sauntered 
down to the place of rendezvous ; and while the 
nimble-footed heir went back for his own three- 
wheeler, I bent the forces of my intellect to study- 
ing the secrets of the craft that was to carry me. It 
had two wheels with bulging spokes, with a kind of 
annex following after wheel which was the rudder. 
Endless chains, like those which brought up the water 
twenty years ago in the New England wells, went 
round a kind of drum which had attachment with 
the treadles ; and though I had never ridden the thing, 
nor even sat upon it, my native sense suggested that 
I had only to put my feet upon the cranks and " let 
nature work," and I should go spinning round the 
world. There were ivory-handled things which worked 
the steering gear, and lots of places where the oil 
ran out, making confidences with my clothes. 

Another lad had joined us ; and in nonchalant 
manner I mounted. It seemed easy to get on. catch 
hold, fish up the treadles, and churn away with ease 
and confidence. I had the theory to perfection, but 
from the start lacked executive power. The treadles 
got away from me, and the steering apparatus missed 
connection and landed me against a lamp-post. The 
thing did not start as if it had any heart in the busi- 



A SHATTERED DREAM. 95 

ness ; and though the small boy dismounted and 
lent a pushing hand, it was not the easy thing I had 
imagined to keep the circulation up. I am still of 
the opinion that the fine young fellows who work 
these monsters with such deceptive grace have passed 
some years in a treadmill, and that no one who has 
not served the State in that capacity can attain either 
speed or admiration on a three-wheeler. In a la- 
borious life I have had hard tasks ; but could the 
lower muscles speak, I am certain they would say 
they found that day their hardest task. Somehow I 
could not get the double action of the thing. I 
could make it go, but I could not make it steer ; or 
if I could steer it, I could not make it go. Having 
to make a choice, I took motion rather than grace, 
and went ricochetting down the avenue, the terror 
of pedestrians. More than once I narrowly escaped 
entanglement with carriage-wheels ; horses shied at 
me ; coachmen raised their voices and would have 
used their whips save for the something in my eye 
that said I was not in trifling mood. The power 
left me on the track of an advancing car, and I 
should have abandoned the thing then and there, 
had the getting off been simply a matter of the will. 
I was half the time butting against the curb, although 
I treated both sides of the street with generous im- 
partiality. So I made my journey, working with 
such vehemence that the perspiration covered me, 



96 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

though it was an autumnal day and those who were 
riding were hugging their furs about their shivering 
forms. 

I could have stood the work, for I am not accounted 
lazy, but a heavier cross was laid upon me. I did 
not actually know, but I surmised, that the whole city 
went out that day for an airing on the road that I 
had taken. I can of course now recall friends that 
did not pass me on the way, but they are few. My 
congregation, certainly, by some prearrangement was 
out in force. Almost before I had learned the 
rudder's larboard and starboard side, I saw one of 
the broad-aisle fellows bearing down on me. He had 
his daughter with him, the veriest laughter-loving 
tease in the church ; and should she spy me, the day 
would be a long way off when she would forget the 
apparition, and the conversation would be wonderfully 
compact that would not afford a gap by which the 
story of my discomfiture would be introduced. They 
did not see me at the first ; and because I dared not 
abandon the machine and run and hide as I would 
have liked to do, I got off, grabbed a wrench, and 
doubling myself up, with back toward the advancing 
carriage, pretended that I was tightening some imag- 
inary bolt. It was a dead failure ; the carriage 
stopped; pleasant laughter rippled toward me. I 
hammered at the bolt but gave no sign, but it was 
without avail. I turned my crimson face and sought 



A SHATTERED DREAM. 97 

excuses, in that I was doing it to please the boy; 
extended my repairs, hoping that they would shorten 
their visit, but they waited to see the mount, and 
I shall never be grateful enough to the good fortune 
that enabled me to catch the treadles and get away 
with a fair amount of grace. 

I saw everybody but the small boy whom I was 
looking for to take the thing home. People whom I 
had never spoken to nodded from their cushions ; 
ladies in their carriages put their heads from their 
windows and called me by my name ; children in the 
Sunday-school ran up to see just how the parson did 
it, that they might give report in the to-morrow's 
classes ; and I am half confident I never saw in so 
short a time so many friends, and fully certain that 
I never wished to see them less. I had come the 
whole distance under protest. The boys had per- 
suaded me, and to coax me on had said, even when 
the pedals stuck and I was bumping against the curb, 
that I was doing beautifully ; although when they had 
wheeled a block or so ahead I could see the rascals' 
shaking sides, and knew that they were laughing at me. 
Had I been governed by my better judgment I should 
have sent the thing home, though I had had to pawn 
my watch and take passage in the cars. 

Well, to close the chapter of misadventures, 1 had 
come to the hill that stretches to the boulevard by 
the prison. The tug was hard, because the grade 
7 



98 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

was steep. The small-boy nuisance abounded now 
upon the sidewalk, insisting on giving aid for a 
consideration. I knew, though I was working with 
desperation, that it would never do to have the 
friends who were bowing kindly at me see me being 
pushed along by half a score of dirty boys ; and 
though I would not have begrudged the money if I 
could have had the " push," my self-respect compelled 
refusal, though I was aching in every joint. The boys 
somehow knew that I wanted them, and so they 
tagged behind ; while one, more cruel than the rest, 
cried out, '' Oh, see the dude ! " which of all the 
horrors of that afternoon was the unkindest cut. The 
top of the hill was reached ; I turned homeward, and 
was ready for the start, when gently coming on me 
was the span of another pew-holder, who from below 
had spied his friend and hurried up to pass the time 
of day. He knew that I was not a happy man, 
although the dream of home and the down-grade 
before me had somewhat raised my spirits. Thanks 
to the law of gravitation, the first stage of the home- 
ward way would be easy. I got on, and she started ; 
the brake would not work and I did not care ; the 
horses shied, but that was not my affair ; the small 
boys jeered, but I was homeward bound, and until the 
chain broke I had the first real enjoyment of the day. 
I got off and went back and got the chain. The 
curious crowd began to gather; a couple of riders, 



A SHATTERED DREAM. 99 

whom I had never seen, stopped, and calHng me by 
name offered to assist ; and while the tinkering went 
on, being tendered the machine that one of my com- 
panions rode, I mounted that and rode away, leaving 
him to get back the broken one as best he could. 
The grade was easier, and I was getting the motion 
now, while the borrowed machine had the steering 
wheel ahead, which helped me some ; and so, led on 
by that "vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself," I 
tried to speed the thing. I knew not how it hap- 
pened, but perhaps I was driving it a little hard ; at 
any rate, suddenly the chain of this one snapped, and 
I was left beside the road with a second wreck upon 
my hands. 

The boys were behind towing the other ruin, there 
were no more worlds to conquer or machines to 
break, so gathering up the greasy chain and hiring, 
at most usurious rates, a small boy to push it home, 
and subsidizing another boy to go with him for 
company, I started homeward the procession of 
broken-downs ; while with hands and coat soiled with 
grease and dust, I walked back good two miles, 
laughing to myself, as I watched the boys, that I 
had gained deliverance at such easy price as the 
rebuilding of the wrecks and the pensioning of the 
boys. 

I would remark, in closing these confessions, that 
for several years I was not the enthusiastic wheelman 



lOO IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

that I had been when cycling with me was a theory 
rather than a condition. But with the coming of the 
Safety, and the heaUng of my wounds, I have pieced 
together the fragments of my shattered dream, and 
am in competition for the biggest medal of the city 
club. 



''WHITE WINGS." 

THERE are some positions in which a man finds 
himself that require explanations. The owner- 
ship of a yacht by a poor man and a sane man, a man, 
too, who has no instinct of sailorship, whose head 
always turns with the lifting of the first wave, is such 
a situation. Our record is against us too, for we 
have spent our life in declaiming against the dangers 
of the fatal sail ; and as if to make our later humilia- 
tion all complete, we issued orders not a week ago to 
the young scion who will be the heir of our liabilities 
and compromise with our creditors, that on no ac- 
count should he during the summer venture his foot 
in a boat with sail. And there she lies on this peace- 
ful morning not three hundred feet away. For an 
hour at least, the line by which she rides at anchor has 
hung limp, so motionless are the waters. There is a 
double picture everywhere. Each tree has another 
self within the water, and every cloud has a reflected 
cloud looking upward from the river. The Revela- 
tor's sea of glass was not more still and rippleless than 
is this fair St. Lawrence on this summer's morning. 



I02 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



Such is the day on which " White Wings " rides at an- 
chor. Had we been long the owner of her, she might 
not seem so beautiful ; but now her lines are fair, and 
with a thousand graces she Ufts her mast against the 
background of the sky, — the 
fairest vision amid all the 
glories of this enchanted 
morning. 

Well, it is a long story, 
for we come to our larger 
follies by degrees. The boys 
did it. They entrapped us 
into a neighbor's boat as a 





u 



kind of ballast ; and we went, that their safety might be 
insured. The intoxication of the dancing waves got 
hold of us. The grandfather of one of the conspirators 
was then invited, and caught the epidemic, and we be- 
came fools together. The women laughed at us, but 



IVHITE JVINGS:' 103 



an hour's sail against the wind made them pleaders for 
the boys. Of course it has been awkward to explain 
some past remarks, and it has taken some sharp turn- 
ings to show that we have been quite consistent. But 
we hold the power of invitation in our hands ; and 
if the tormenting becomes too severe, we can omit 
the offenders from the list of those who are asked to 
share our voyages. 

And then it was such a bargain ; and there were 
two of us. Why, a few less bonnets for the wives, 
the old feathers recurled instead of cast away, a few 
less dresses, — and the thing is paid for. We have 
ciphered it out, and know that the expenditure was 
wise. Of course there are some things we did not 
think of. The seller of the boat was a little over- 
sanguine in saying that the sails were good for half-a- 
dozen years ; they will have to be replaced next 
season. An anchor must be procured at once ; the 
cabinet-work be repaired. The skiff we crushed at 
our neighbor's dock, after the seller left us with his 
check, was not repaired for half the estimate he put 
upon the job ; and the dismanthng and outfitting and 
the winter's care we find are items which were not 
considered when we felicitated ourselves upon being 
the owners of a yacht. 

But there she rides at anchor ; and if she never left 
her moorings she is worth all she cost, or most of it, 
for the picture she makes on the enchanted waters of 



I04 IV^YSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES 

this summer's morning. However, she is not to ride 
at anchor thus. Within our veins is yet the thrill of 
yesterday's excitements. How splendidly she sailed ! 
We were certain that nothing on these waters could 
outsail her, until the " Water Witch" came out and 
marched right by us on the windward side. We are 
not skilful yet in all the science of sailorship. Our 
partner will have to stop speaking of the " downhill " 
and " uphill " sides, and use leeward and windward ; 
and when we tell him again to " luff her up," he 
must not stop and ask us what we mean by luffing her. 
But then we know more than we used to know. We 
know that it is not safe to take a standing jibe, and 
that in tacking we must bring her in the wind ; that 
the rope which holds the long pole at the bottom of 
the sail must not be tied ; that the clothes-lines which 
hoist the sail must not be tangled ; and that a boat 
with a five-foot draught cannot go over a two-foot 
shoal. Of course this is not much, but it is a good 
deal more than we knew a week ago. 

Well, we never knew till now what we missed in 
our yachtless days, — the exhilaration, the sense of 
mastery, the freshness and splendor of the air, the 
sense of motion. New worlds have opened to us; 
and the fair scenery of these islands, the splendid 
reaches of these incomparable waters, have a double 
charm now that we can explore them on the wings of 



IVHITE IVINGSy 105 



the wind. What cruises we will take, what visions we 
will have, what music will come from dashing sprays, 
what friendships will we make, as we sit beneath our 
sails and are borne hither and thither by "White 
Wings " in the days that are to be ! 



SORRENTO. 

THERE is no vision on the earth more fair than 
the Bay of Naples from the heights of St. 
Elmo. The city reveals only its beauty, hiding its 
deformity ; the sea is blue and radiant with the light 
that glorifies it; and the magic circlet of the shore 
that bounds it is made of fair cities that have his- 
toric fame. In the distance, fair Capri rises empur- 
pled from the sea, and Ischia and other islands add 
romance and beauty to the fairest panorama the earth 
contains. The line of smoke floats like a black 
plume from the distant steamers, while fishers' boats 
with lateen sails are in the nearer vision, like painted 
ships upon a painted sea. The days at Naples are 
revelations, and at night the soul is awed with a 
beauty that seems to be not of earth. 

Vesuvius, with its faint cloud of smoke rising like 
an exhalation, sits like a monarch in the midst of 
splendors ; and cities, towns, and vineyards, fields over 
which historic armies have marched, heights and 
headlands on which poets have sat and sung immortal 
songs, make up the details in the fair picture that one 



SORRENTO. 107 



sees, as from St. Elmo's heights he looks down upon 
the enchanted bay and the fair shores that are kissed 
by its waters. 

Leave behind the tenantless streets of Pompeii, and 
ride along the shore to fair Sorrento, and nowhere 
shall you find a road more wondrous. Following 
every indentation of the coast, winding along the bor- 
ders of every cliff, the road is a path of fair surprises, 
opening at every headland fairer outlooks, and at 
every landward turn revealing vistas of field and forest. 
Now far below the waters break in surging mono- 
tones against the base of beetling crags ; the drap- 
eries of sea-weed floating in and out with the pulsing 
of the waves ; and then the road drops down, until the 
wheels traverse the white beaches of the sea. Up 
again and on, winding amid cliffs and crags, the road 
goes on ; inward by rocky vine-clad gorge, terraced 
with olive-trees, the road gives glimpses of white villas 
peeping from the darker foliage of the fig and orange 
trees. Between the cliffs there are sheltered coves, 
with tiny boats upon their beaches, and bathers 
sporting in the waves. The villages are quaint, with 
curious houses painted with the brilliant colors that 
these sunny-hearted Italians love, with wayside 
shrines consecrated to the Holy Virgin, with faded 
flowers which love or penitence has offered with a 
prayer. In the tiny shops and on the sidewalk the 
little industries are carried on, and from the balconies 



io8 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



black-eyed girls fling down their chattering smiles. 
So, through Castellamare and other towns, the road 
comes to fair Sorrento. 

It is the place which Nature made for the abiding 
of those who love her most ; and hither they have 




come, — poets, to sit upon her cliffs and weave the 
beauty of her scenes into verse ; artists, who have 
tried, but tried in vain, to paint some of the visions 
splendid ; novelists, to make this the place of their 
romances ; and lovers, to add the witcheries of her 
enchantments to their tales of love. 

Backward toward the mountains there are winding 
roads, shadowed with fair forests, peasants' homes set 
in the midst of orchards garlanded with vines ; and on 
the seaward side, the great cliff rises, and on the rim 



SORRENTO. 109 



of it Sorrento sits, as kings and poets have sat on 
these diffs on summer days and looked out on the 
sea. You shall find no hotel in Europe more finely 
placed than the Tramontane at Sorrento. Drop a 
stone from the balcony of its upper rooms, it shall go 
down three hundred feet to the very beach on which 
the Italian fishermen and women are chanting their 
songs as they draw their nets. On the sea are fisher- 
boats with curiously fashioned and colored sails. The 
water is so clear that one can note the shells on the 
bottom of the sea. Go, by winding subterranean pas- 
sages, to the beach below. Swim in the waters of 
this Bay of Naples, with all the tides of the Mediter- 
ranean lifting you in their mighty arms. The deli- 
cious waters fold you with a caress, and the tonic of 
the salt sea gives the invigoration of youth to every 
nerve. Then come back, and from the upper balcony 
look out on Nature's masterpiece. There is the 
reddening glow of sunset in the west. Look straight 
across ; that whitened cliff rising from the sea is 
Ischia, and with a narrow belt of sea between, the 
adjacent cliff is the northern horn of the crescent 
that makes the incomparable bay. In high-sloping 
hills, the line of coast comes on, rimmed with fair 
cities, reaching upward through orchard-girdled towns, 
until the summit of Vesuvius is reached. This is the 
line that is set against the horizon. How fair Naples 
is, behind the veil of distance that is between it and 



no IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Sorrento ! Its beggar's rags are changed to a mon- 
arch's royal robes; and from its beaches to its 
summit, where is the castle of St. Elmo and the mon- 
astery of St. Martino, there is no sign of anything 
that is not beautiful. 

In the little bay beyond lies Castellamare, and 
behind it are its mountains, set as foothills against the 
background of the Apennines. These things are only 
the dotted outlines of the picture of Naples and its 
environs, as seen from the cliff at Sorrento ; to com- 
plete the picture one must put in a multitude of 
villages, with groves and terraced hills, winding paths, 
villas, and monasteries, the ruins of old castles with 
the ever-changing panorama of the sea, and the match- 
less canopy of an Italian sky. 

Wander where one will, he cannot err in this deli- 
cious region ; every path is fit for a lovers' walk, and 
every headland for a poet's musings. The peasants' 
cottages, the fishers' villages in the tiny coves below, 
the winding paths which find the summits of the hills, 
the old houses where the world's poets lived and 
wrote the songs which the world for centuries has 
sung, — everything at fair Sorrento touches the heart 
with the spell of romance and beauty. Life becomes 
idyllic ; and the heart is tenanted with memories 
which will last through the eternities. 

But Sorrento is the city of the sea, rather than of 
the land. It never can escape allegiance to the siren 



SORRENTO. 1 1 1 



sea, that holds it captive with a thousand fascinations. 
Is there any sea so blue? Is there elsewhere on any 
waters such varied life ? Has any bay a tithe of the 
splendor that rims around the Bay of Naples, as seen 
from Sorrento, with its islands and its cities ? — Naples 
a magic city by day, a crescent of fire by night, while 
Vesuvius, by day a pillar of cloud, by night a pillar 
of fire, sentinels the glorious scene. 

Every hour of the day brings a new transformation 
in the shifting kaleidoscope of beauty. The day 
comes to the songs of the fishermen drawing their 
nets beneath Sorrento's cliffs ; at noonday the sea 
becomes rippleless, and Naples changes from a city 
to a mirage ; and when the night comes on, and one 
by one the lights go out that make the towns and 
cities a coronal of fire around the bay, then within 
the hospitable walls of the Tramontane there are the 
peasants dancing the Tarantella to the pleasant music 
of the castanets, — and then sleep and its dreams, 
but never can the dreams of night or day be half so 
fair as the realities of the Bay of Naples and fair 
Sorrento. 



A LOST ART. 

CALLING upon a friend upon a winter's night, we 
found him sitting by his study fire, reading the 
letters of his grandmother, written nearly a hundred 
years before. They were yellow with age, written in 
curiously fashioned characters, and bearing the marks 
that age inflicts. 

Her home was in New England ; and in these silent 
chronicles there were many pictures of the rude life 
of those early days. The villages were far apart, and 
through the woods she used to ride on visitations to 
her friends. Life was simple in its necessities, and 
there was little movement or color in its unfoldings. 
The stir of cities spent its noise long before it could 
reach the quiet Berkshire region where she lived, 
and the great outward world that beat its measures 
on the borders of the sea seemed like a fairy world, 
so far was it away. 

The letters were written in what must have been 
her middle life, for they contained the story of her 
household cares, and were full of tender apprehension 
for the boy she loved. 



A LOST ART. 113 



He had gone through the wilderness, seeking fortune 
in the mysterious city, and these letters were fragrant 
with the prayerful followings of her mother-love. She 
was a child of the Puritans, and had a religious faith 
which glowed in all the unconscious utterances of 
these letters of friendship. And yet she lived far 
enough away from the sterner age of faith to have 
love for Nature and the graces of humanity ; and 
though she felt the reality of faith, it was something 
tender and alluring, and worship was joy, and devo 
tion rapture. 

She described the Sabbaths as they passed, and how 
the birds sang to her as she walked to service through 
the woods, and how the silence of the Sabbath brooded 
over her like a dream of heaven, and how she gathered 
with the saints, and in the silence of her meditation 
mingled loving memories of the absent boy with her 
prayers to God. She told the story of the preacher's 
words ; and though the sermon was of the sterner cast 
that marked the olden days, yet in passing through 
her mind it had caught a grace which changed it 
almost into a poet's idyl. There was no hint of petty 
gossip, nor the pardonable frivolity which even the 
souls of saints are wont to witness when they touch 
for a time the vanities of a world of fashion ; but 
the memories of the Sabbath were of prayer and 
song, the meditations of the house of God, which was 
the gate of heaven. It was only a glance into the 



114 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



sacred sanctuary of a woman's heart that had turned 
to dust half a century ago ; but it revealed a life as 
sweet as the lives of saints, and brought vision of such 
living as poets sing of, where life's hard conditions are 
changed into content and radiance by the alchemy 
of a faith that can transmute common things into 
heroic life. 

The story of these faded letters suggests the query 
whether the letter-writing of the past is not a lost art. 
Is there anywhere in New England now one single 
saint who makes, in the confidence of friendship, 
such chronicles of her daily life? Who tells how the 
days come and what they bring, what moods of 
thought, what hopes and fears? Who breathes in 
language her silent prayers, and lets her inmost heart 
tell the story of its joys and griefs? 

The world's literature has nothing equal in revela- 
tion to the letters that have been written from heart 
to heart, without one thought that the world would 
ever read ; and to-day, though the world is filled with 
books, yet the best literature that men have written 
has never seen the light, for in friendship's letters it 
has been read and gathered beneath the eaves of 
garret roofs, or exhaled its riches in the ashes of 
fires long since burned out. 

The letters of Shelley have come down to us, and 
surely the poet's pen never framed sweeter music than 
some of the phrases which friendship's wand evoked. 



A LOST ART. 115 



Mesdames de Stael and Recamier conquered the 
social world by the sovereignty of the pen. No- 
where does Thackeray so reveal his inner Hfe as in 
the unconscious utterances of the letters of personal 
friendship. In his pubKc works there is the taint of 
cynicism ; but when heart speaks to heart, there is the 
genuine ring of a soul that cries exultantly, " God 
lives; all's well with the world!" We saw a letter 
once written by the Adams who was known by his 
generation as the man of controversy and war ; and 
yet here in the letter there was revealed the sunny 
side of the great man's nature, and there was grace 
and tenderness, a touch of poetry even, and such 
kindliness for all the world as no one could even 
dream belonged to the stern man of war and battle. 
The plays of Shakespeare reveal all the secrets of all 
men's minds, save that of Shakespeare's own. They 
contain all revelations save self-revealings ; for the 
king of art, obedient to the laws of his own sovereign 
realm, concealed the creator's personality behind the 
created things. What would the world not give if 
only it could somewhere find that precious bundle of 
faded letters sent from London to the little home at 
Stratford, where Anne Hathaway lived and waited for 
the coming back of the absent one, until at last, with 
fortune won, they should come together to their 
" Castle in Spain," beside the reeds and rushes of 
the gentle Avon? What rare wit, what sweet phil- 



Il6 JV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

osophy, would be found in the letters of the absent 
husband to his wife, written in the midst of his 
creative inspirations, brilliant with the glow of his 
divinest moods ; or when, the immortal work finished, 
the poet's hand, made clever with its facile workings, 
strung on the golden thread of love the jewels which, 
because of the richness of his treasures, he could not 
use in weaving the embroideries of kings. 

The French cynic used to say that the object of 
language was to conceal thought ; but when men 
talk as the birds sing to their solitary mates, when 
mothers talk to children over the wastes of distance, 
when hearts use that secret language which, like the 
cipher speech of ambassadors to kings, is known only 
to the one addressed, then language is not a mask, 
but an interpreter. There is no literature, save the 
literature of written letters, where such language can 
be used ; there is no writing, save that of personal 
letters, which can be free from the self-consciousness 
which makes men hypocrites ; and the world is the 
loser, and falsehood gains, when the pen of friend- 
ship loses the art of speech, and the secrets of human 
hearts can find no language with which to tell their 
tale. 

The uncovering of the tombs of Deirel-Bahari have 
brought to light the bodies of the Egyptian kings 
who ruled when Israel was in bondage. The mummy- 
cloths tell the story of the Pharaohs and bring back 



A LOST ART. 1 17 



the very dynasties which saw the birth of the world's 
most fateful nation. So there are hidden somewhere, 
in forgotten letters, dynasties of genius, words which, 
could they only come to light, would sway imagination 
and be the seed-thoughts of new creations. The story 
of our war thus slumbers yet, as the seven sleepers 
slept. It has never been told, nor will it, until from 
the thousand attics of New England and Western 
homes, from the old boxes beneath the eaves, from 
the old chests, where in neglect and forgetfulness 
they yellow with the years, the letters of the soldier 
boys are resurrected and made to tell the story of a 
nation's deliverance. Our printed histories tell only 
the line of armies' marches, the place of battle, the 
number slain upon the field, the proclamations of 
the leaders, the rise and fall of great captains of war. 
But the nation was saved not by proclamations, but 
by men ; not by leaders and commanders of the 
people, but by the common soldiers. And how the 
soldiers' hearts were kept true and loyal, and their 
courage strong by memories of home ; and how 
electric deeds were stimulated by loving hearts reach- 
ing from the homestead to the camp, — this story 
is told only in the nameless letters, which to-day, 
wearing still the postmark of the camp, he neglected 
and forgotten in a hundred thousand homes. 

As we write these random thoughts, we take from 
their hiding-place some letters that we cherish, and 



Il8 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

here are the deUcate, finely written lines of Chapin ; 
and who would have ever thought that one who 
wielded the hammer of a Thor, and hurled the light- 
nings of forceful speech as Jupiter threw his thunder- 
bolts, should have held the pen, which in his grasp 
was a wizard's wand of power, with a touch as light as 
that of a woman's hand? 

And here is a memento of the great preacher of the 
ages, with curvatures of hne and letter graceful as 
the fashion of his speech, and in the words a gleam 
of the humor's sunshine that made Beecher the idol- 
ized of men. And here, again, is a letter of the 
poet. Bayard Taylor, without one hint of the abandon 
of the poet's touch, but clear and regular, as though 
written by one whose trade it was to set copies for 
a school-boy's task. So we might go on and on, and 
speak of letters as revealers of men, and call forth 
the forgotten histories that are wrapped within friend- 
ship's common letters. 

But these things are of the past, for letter-writing 
is swiftly becoming a lost art. A new age has come, 
— an age not of confidences, but of business. Trade 
has annihilated friendship ; and the telegraph and 
postal-card have made obsolete the old-time letters 
of other days. Letters are bred of sentiment, and 
sentiment is not in fashion in this age of ours. 
Emotion is unmannerly ; and the god of silence 
has deposed the deity of confidence. Jerusalem is 



A LOST ART. 119 



lighted with incandescent loops, and the tramways 
will soon be built on the Damascus road. There 
are no Abrahams now. " What would you do, Tom, 
if you should receive a message commanding you to 
offer up your son upon the altar?" "Well," said 
Tom, who was once a telegraph operator, " I should 
ask to have the message repeated." 

The mail-trains carry heavier freightage than used 
to go in the pouches of the carrier or the box of the 
tri-weekly stage ; but there was more sentiment and 
genuine friendship in the saddle-bags of the mail- 
carrier a century ago than rides now in the postal- 
cars of the " Chicago specials " or the mail-sacks of 
the ''Shore Line." 

Business has no hour in its calendar of duties 
for friendship, and there is no writing-paper in 
modern homes, except the pads of the shop. The 
letter-writer, who could fill his four and forty pages 
without one hint of shop or market, went out when 
the telegraph came in, and is now only the fossil of 
an extinct age. But with his going went one of the 
best elements of literature, and from the hour of his 
departure history has been able to fashion only lying 
chronicles. The lost art of letter-writing is to be 
lamented not simply for itself alone, but because it 
indicates that friendship itself is becoming a lost art. 
" Friendship's affections," Sterne tells us, " are drawn 
together by fine-spun threads ; " and the old saw has 



120 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

it that " A letter timely writ, is a rivet in affection's 
chain." Napoleon was not a man of friendships, but 
he knew that a silent absence breeds alienation and 
forgetfulness, and so he wrote to those he loved, 
" Let us record the deeds that we have performed 
together." Let us not deceive ourselves ; if friends 
are forgotten it is because friendship is dead: if 
after absent friends the heart sends out no following 
tendrils, it is not because the competitions of a busy 
age forbid, but because love has such shallow roots 
that it cannot survive departure. So long as friend- 
ship has any vitality of life, it has a language which 
utters itself across the wastes of space, and by the 
vehicle of letters, bridges absence and keeps alive its 
holy fellowships. Absence brings not forgetfulness, 
for, — 

" Love reckons hours for months and days for years ; 
And every little absence is an age." 

The admonition of this homily is simply this, that 
the old-time fashion of our fathers be renewed again ; 
that we pause in the hot racings of our life to foster 
the friendships of the present and keep alive the 
loves of other days ; that we mingle with the terse 
letters of our shops those other letters that have no 
mission other than that of love, and by the written 
language of friendly letters weave new strands to bind 
together our forgetful hearts. Some one has said, 



A LOST ART. 12 



" Know, if you have a friend, you ought to visit him 
often. The road is grown over with grass, the 
bushes quickly spread over it, if it is not constantly 
travelled." 

The friendly letter is the carrier which keeps hearts 
in true alliance, and when hearts lose the language of 
affection love is dumb because it is dead. The world 
has lost many of the arts it once had learned, but it 
could better lose all that it has or ever had than to 
lose the art of all the arts, — the art of friendship. 



THE SPRING CLEANING. 

I HAVE always asserted that a woman likes house- 
cleaning with an intensity of affection only infe- 
rior to her passion for shopping. The man willing to 
challenge the truth of the statement never has been 
found. The feminine instinct for house-cleaning 
reconciles one to the idea that Adam fell at the 
suggestion of his wife, and that a certain degree of 
natural depravity has never been civilized out of the 
fairer sex. 

The periodical ordeal is nearly finished with us, 
although while this writing is in progress I hear 
sweet symphonies of the scrubbing-brush on the 
study door. The smell of soap is rapidly disappear- 
ing ; and in time, I suppose, the misplaced things will 
be found, and we shall become reconciled to the loss 
of the keepsakes that have been destroyed. I console 
myself with the reflection that it is a sad world any- 
way, and that my neighbors across the way are now 
catching the same punishment. My books have been 
disturbed, my study has been invaded, and life gener- 
ally made miserable. The cleaners have driven me 



THE SPRING CLEANING. 1 23 

at the point of the scrubbing-brush from room to 
room ; and writing which began on the lower planes 
has been finished on the attic heights. 

I do not think that there has been in my treatment 
any special malignity beyond that which is incidental 
to the natural riot of 
the cleaning, although 
I have been careful not 
to make this admis- 
sion within my own 
home. But no way has 
yet been found by 
which a woman can 
clean a house with a 
man in it with any 
comfort to the man. 
I have my own notions 
of how things will go 
when the full suffrage 
comes, and the woman 
becomes the bread- 
winner and the man ^ 
the bread-maker. I 

shall let the thing go till the house becomes unten- 
antable, and then burn the house. 

I have, however, reduced the house-cleaning torture 
to a minimum, for I have found, in the cellar of a 
building on a neighboring avenue, a saturnine me- 




124 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

chanic, who has rare skill in adjusting carpets, easing 
doors, mending window-cords, and patching furniture ; 
and by throwing myself back on a personal incom- 
petency, which is largely assumed, this general utility 
man has gradually usurped my place as a general 
repairer of the household. 

At a heavy cost of personal humiliation I have 
worked out a philosophy from which I argue that 
there is nothing more disastrous to a person than to 
be understood to possess a kind of omniscience. 
Into the lap of the skilful mender are thrown the 
undarned stockings of the family ; and if only one is 
content to be thought a fool, he can barter his pride 
for a vast amount of comfort. The old academy and 
college chum does not dream to this day that any 
amount of teaching would ever enable me to build a 
fire ; and I shall never cease to have reproaches for 
not more generally availing myself of the assumption 
of a general incompetency. 

I have always remembered the beatific joy with 
which a certain woman once rushed into my presence 
and exclaimed, " I 'm a widow; 1 'm a widow ! " I 
saw something of this in the good lady who comes 
round at the semi-annual cleaning and lends a hand. 
In the gossip of the scrubbers, the infelicities of the 
sterner sex were commented on, after the pleas- 
ant manner that women have. The good woman, 
with marvellous self-complacency, remarked, " Thank 



THE SPRING CLEANING. 1 25 

Heaven ! I have no worry about my husband. He 
is ' sent up ' regularly twice a year for six months, 
and so long as liquor is sold I '11 never have to worry 
as to where he keeps himself nights." In a life of 
many cares she felt grateful that her lot was not with- 
out its pleasant features. 

So by working together, we have come to the end 
of the semi-annual tumult. By careful watching, I 
have managed to save most of my best clothes from 
being bestowed on carpet-beaters and scrubbers. The 
bulk of the library is on the shelves, and the lost 
sermons and addresses will doubtless be found during 
the coming season. I have poulticed out the major 
part of the throat inflammations contracted by the 
evaporation of the suds, and shall enjoy life with such 
subdued comfort as is permitted to those who know 
that there will be another invasion of the scrubbing- 
pail in the early autumn. I shall be reminded that 
I have escaped from the spring cleaning as I see my 
old pantaloons from time to time on the overgrown 
boys of the artists who served us during the celebra- 
tion. In the joyfulness of my deliverance, I shall 
permit my wounds to heal, and forgive, as I have 
ever done, the tormentors of my peace. 



A DREAM OF THE ADRIATIC. 

OUR stay in Florence had been brief. The day 
was hot as no others of the summer were. Our 
memory of it is of a fair city simmering beside the 
waters of the yellow Arno, with pleasant morning 
rides by winding ways to the heights of San Miniato, 
and delicious loiterings in the shadow of Giotto's 
princely tower, and the monastery of St. Marco rich 
with memories of Fra Angelico and Savonarola. But 
the hot breath of the sirocco was in the air, and we 
must needs creep within the shadows of the palaces 
as we walked the streets ; and we were glad, yet sad, 
when we came out of the hot valley of the Arno and 
wended our way to Venice. Twenty years before we 
had visited the city. The memory of it had never 
left us ; the music of its waters, the beauty of its 
palaces, the incomparable grace that makes it the 
world's wonder city, — all had been cherished ; and we 
came as a lover comes to his beloved, with the rapture 
of anticipated joy. 

And not an expectation was unreaUzed. Day by 
day the wonder grew : fair as a dream seemed its 



A DREAM OF THE ADRIATIC. 12/ 

palaces ; and the magic colors which made every 
vision an enchanted one never faded into the light 
of common day. It is not possible for the inartistic 
mind to see in St. Mark's all the beauty that inspired 
the pen of Ruskin to its rhapsodies. It does not awe 
as does the cathedral of Cologne or any of the Gothic 
structures of the north. Indeed, no architecture save 
the Gothic gives the soul the thrill of great upliftings. 
Before the majesty of Milan one stands awed and 
silent. One feels before that matchless building that 
out of the perfection of beauty God shines, and 
strength and beauty are married in the magnificent 
amplitudes and loveliness of that miracle of marble. 
There is no such thrill of great emotions before St. 
Mark's ; but it charms and fascinates, it weaves the 
witchery of its beauty over every sense, and one 
loves it and comes and looks at it, and comes again 
and leaves it at last with such a delicious sadness as 
lovers have at parting. 

Venice is old and decayed. It has not rocked the 
cradle of a single son of commanding fame. It makes 
merchandise of its beauty and lives upon its memories. 
It is without industry ; there is no thrill of commerce 
along its water-ways. It is a show city of the past, 
but Rome is not richer in associations, and no city in 
the world has a tithe of its unique and bewildering 
beauty. One never tires of the palaces of the Grand 
Canal ; and in the by-ways, everywhere, there are sur- 



128 M/ AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

prises of loveliness, — a shapely bridge, a fagade 
which combines Grecian form and Oriental color, a 
distant vista of mingling sky and sea, a graceful tower, 
a swelling dome, a gondola gliding noiselessly upon 
the waters like the flitting of a bird, such bewilder- 
ment of beauty as makes Venetian days dream-like 
and unreal. 

Nothing in Venice so enraptured as the colors. 
What it is, — whether some witchery of the air, some 
alchemy of the sea and atmosphere, or some rare magic 
of ochre or pigment, — one cannot tell, but the colors 
had a softness and delicacy indescribable. And the 
mantle of color was over everything. The Ducal 
Palace was not marble, but ivory ; the palaces of the 
canals, made of marble, porphyry, and serpentine, 
were softly hued with rose and pink, and every rich- 
ness of delicious hues. The very lateen sails of the 
fishing-boats were dyed with coarse and uncostly 
colors, but even their homely serviceableness had a 
softness of hue, as though some fairy goddess had 
dissolved a jewel in the dyer's vat. 

Sitting in the little steamer at the Lido one day, we 
cast our eyes toward the south and west, and the vis- 
ion was a kaleidoscope of color, except that the colors 
of the kaleidoscope are harsh and cold, and these 
were soft as the mist. We took pencil and paper and 
drew rough color-sketches of the old walls, the fac- 
tories, the bit of green before the monastery, the 



A DREAM OF THE ADRIATIC. 1 29 

distant islands, trees, clouds, and the lagoon ; and then 
we counted the distinct hues, and there were upward 
of thirty in the scene swept by our vision. So was 
it everywhere in Venice. Everything was glorified. 
The iron buoy floating in the harbor, to which the 
cables of the Italian iron-clads were fastened, was but 
a floating iron cask like others of its kind. It was 
painted red, with good, plain, homely color we have 
no doubt ; but some magic brush had touched it, and 
its hues were such as Titian might have taken for the 
Doge's robes within the palace, — soft, a mingled red 
and rose, so that as it floated there on the surface of 
the waters it seemed as if it were a rose-leaf set in the 
foreground of enchanted palaces. Different cities 
have diff'erent colors. Black and white fitly represent 
Rome, for the old city is colorless. Fiesole and the 
Arno at Florence need a touch of color, and sunny 
Naples is a dream of it ; but beyond these, plain, un- 
colored pictures fitly represent the other cities. But 
Venice uncolored is not Venice. As well portray the 
frescos of Versailles or the pictures of Titian and 
Rubens with lights and shades as to picture Venice 
without the magic colors that are as much a part of 
her architecture as the columns of her fagades and 
the swelling domes of her churches. 

Before the harbor of Venice is the great bar which 
guards its entrance, and is called the Lido. It is 
fairly desolate, being only a ridge of sand flecked with 
9 



I30 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

trees. There are burial-places on it, buildings not 
many, tiny villages, a scattered suburban life. But 
beyond it on the other side is the Adriatic ; and here 
we came, on that first day in Venice, to the great 
pavilion, to bathe in the waters of that fair sea of 
which we had dreamed since childhood. 

All the way from Florence we had seen the quiver- 
ing of the olive leaves in the hot sun; the old cities 
along the way were slumbering in the intensity of 
heat ; the fields were deserted by the peasants ; and 
Venice, which we had left behind, was asleep in the 
siesta which the heat had made day long. The 
tourists of the world were here, sitting in the great 
pavilion above the waters, looking out on the fair sea, 
while music added its enchantment, and sky and sea 
mingled in a dream of beauty. There beyond were 
the coasts of Dalmatia, and beyond the clouds lay 
Greece. 

We had bathed in the Mediterranean at Sorrento, 
and had felt the splendid thrill of its tonic waters ; but 
when we descended from the pavilion into the shallow 
waters of the Adriatic, and walked out over the softest 
sand into the deepening waters until they wrapped us 
all around, then we felt for the first time the luxury 
that the sea has when it is rightly attempered to the 
human frame. The temperature of air and water 
were almost the same ; and something of the softness 
of the air was in the water, and there was a caressing 



A DREAM OF THE ADRIATIC. 131 

in its touch, and a soft deliciousness that made Hfe 
exhilarant, not with any stimulus but by very sensu- 
ousness of luxury. And so the moments lengthened, 
and an hour passed ; and with every sense enraptured 
we came reluctantly out of the sea and went to our 
home. Every day we went thither ; every day the joy 
was repeated and intensified. Life found renewal in 
the sea ; and while the body was wrapped in the satin 
folds of the sea, the ear was charmed with the music, 
and the vision was enthralled with the panorama, of 
waters. The fishing-boats, gay with their lateen sails, 
were in the distance ; far away were larger vessels, 
sailing southward, as in the days of the Venetian Doges 
the ships of the city sailed to Greece and Corinth, 
every sailor enjoined by edict to bring back some 
spoil of art or beauty for the enrichment of the city. 
It was not hard to remember that it was in these very 
waters that the Bucentaur sailed, and that here the 
Doge with ring of gold married the sea to Venice as 
its bride. One day while here, the clouds grew dark 
and in great wild volumes rolled together in the south, 
shot through with rays of sunlight, illuminated, per- 
meated with the light, until their blackness changed 
to purple and amethyst and softest rose, and then, 
conquered by the light, they melted away into a great 
sun mist which was like an atmosphere of gold. 

Rejuvenated, elate with quickened senses, every 
breath a joy, and every step a delight, day by day we 



132 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

came back to Venice, by the iron-clads lying at 
anchor here, by the arsenal from which crusading 
hosts went forth in other days, with funeral barges 
slowly guided seaward to the Lido, by fair tourists 
singing songs of joy, while dome, spire, palace front, 
and all the bewilderment and grace of beauty were 
hued in the enchantments of the dying day. Oh, 
how wonderful it was, and what magic glamours the 
mingling sea and air can bring here in this fair city by 
the sea ! Then the Venetian nights ! — in the piazza 
with the background of the cathedral and the famed 
horses of St. Mark's, and the piazzetta with the twin 
columns which sentinel the waters, and the Ducal 
Palace, which at night became with its ivory softness 
a palace of enchantment, and the driftings beneath 
the Rialto, and by the house of Desdemona, over the 
waters which had floated armies whose deeds are his- 
toric ! Then the music at night upon the canals, 
while the light streamed down from the palaces, and 
shimmered in the rippling waters ; and the long walks 
through the narrow streets to the little square where 
Antonio and Bassanio trafficked, crossing the tiny 
bridges which spanned the dark waters, and seeing 
the weird shadows of the sombre water-ways ! 

It may be that one does not feci the awe of great 
memories in Venice as he does in Rome, nor yet the 
thrill of great upliftings as at Chamouni looking at the 
silver peak of Mont Blanc, or any new thrill of liberty 



A DREAM OF THE ADRIATIC. 133 

as at Geneva, or any quiet reverence for art as at 
Florence, but for days of dreaming and nights of 
delicious revery there is no spot Uke Venice. When 
the journey is over and one is set again to the hard 
tasks of Hfe, in those idUng moments when the mind 
is untethered and told to wander where it will, how 
like the arrow from the Tartar's bow it flies across the 
snows and over the seas until it rests its flight in the 
city by the sea ! And even there it loiters not so 
fondly at the Rialto, or before St. Mark's, as beside 
the Adriatic, with the coasts of Dalmatia beyond, and 
still beyond the clouds, Greece and Athens. 



THE STORY OF A MOTHER. 

THE record of her early life may be passed over^ 
for this story is the story of a mother. While 
comparatively young, she was left a widow with eight 
children. Her married life had been bright, her home 
happy. The conditions of life in those days were not 
easy ; but her husband had been a man of courage, 
industry, and integrity, and with great faith and reso- 
luteness they were laying the foundations of success, 
when death brought widowhood to her. 

The struggle which followed, was that which has 
been with widowed ones since the world was ; but 
with fine fortitude, energy, and patience, she kept 
her brood of children with her, and the home un- 
broken. She fortunately was endowed with qualities 
that fitted her for the struggle that lay before her. 
She was resolute, resourceful, broad-minded, tactful, 
with native shrewdness and strength of mind ; prac- 
tical, yet with large imagination and humor that en- 
abled her to see the other and softer side of life's 
hard ways. While without imperiousness, she had 
large pride of character. Her children were educated 



THE STORY OF A MOTHER. 135 

in all the principles of manliness, were taught to hate 
falsehood, to love justice, to be upright, to be scrupu- 
lously careful in personal attire, not to minister to 
pride but to manly and womanly self-respect. 

With all her courage and strength of character, she 
never was anything but womanly. The tender graces 
of her life never hardened into masculine coarseness, 
under the asperities of life. Her sympathies kept 
sweet, mind and heart remaining always visionful, 
open, responsive to beauty, faith, trust, and love. 
The strength of her personality held the admiration of 
her children to the last ; and so winning was her 
motherliness that their love was not simply devotion 
but homage. 

Thus far this story has been the familiar one of 
daily life, — faithful, motherly devotion, unwasting 
love and sacrifice, — and then what ? Usually neglect 
and forgetfulness on the part of the children for 
whom motherhood gives its life. In every-day life 
this, perhaps, is the familiar sequel ; and there is 
nothing more pitiful than the neglect and forgetful- 
ness that come to the mother in return for the sweet- 
est sacrifices the world witnesses. Life comes from her 
with pain and sorrow ; it is preserved by her solici- 
tudes. Her every breath is a prayer to God for 
her children. Make others great, make these my 
children good, is her constant invocation. And the 
children go out into the world and become absorbed in 



136 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

its ambitions ; the path back to the old home is in- 
frequently trodden ; visits to the old home become 
few and hurried; the tendrils of affection are untwined 
and soon are clinging to new homes and fresh inter- 
ests. Pitiful are the excuses that mothers ever are 
ready to give for the neglect of children ! How 
they strive to cheat themselves with little sophistries 
into believing that the inclination to come to them is 
thwarted by unwilling duties, that neglect is not for- 
getfulness ! And yet in the mother- heart is the great 
yearning for a little morsel of her children's love. 
If they would only come ! If only they wished to 
come ! There is no heart-hunger in the world so 
great as this unutterable longing of motherhood for 
the sympathy, remembrance, and love of children. 
The world has no sadder or profounder tragedy than 
the loneliness of mothers, living in the old home with 
the memories of their children, yearning for their 
presence, longing for their love, and yet forsaken and 
abandoned by those for whom they would gladly die. 

It is not that humanity is cruel-hearted that it is 
so forgetful of its mothers ; it is only that it fails to 
understand the divinity of a mother's love, until par- 
entage reveals, sometimes too late, in a new generation, 
the mystery of it all. 

The significance of the hfe of the mother whose 
story is being told, is that her motherhood received 
the devotion and homage that belonged to it. No- 



THE STORY OF A MOTHER. 137 

where was motherhood more royally honored. The 
personality was rare that could so win and keep the 
devotion of children. What it was, cannot be defined, 
but it held child-love with lover-like fascination. The 
children had large place and interest in the world ; 
they had many friendships ; they had homes and 
children ; but there was never abdication of the 
mother's throne, and their allegiance was never less 
than absolute. Wives and husbands came, — they in 
turn became friends and lovers ; children were born, 
— their parent's mother became their idol, too. 

This mother's children went out to find their work 
in life. They found large place and wrought high 
service. But the impulse of it all, the love of hu- 
manity, the world-wide faith, the large sagacity, the 
industrial and business enterprise, the far-reaching 
vision, the love of harmony and beauty, the forceful 
energy to win success, came from the father and mother 
who gave them life. And the mother's love found an 
answering love. The children not alone called her 
name blessed, but they made her life blessed. Great 
wealth came to one of her sons, and he esteemed 
it a privilege to make provision for her, and did so 
with royal bountifulness. 

When old age was coming to her, and the energy 
of life was running low, it was seen that unless some- 
thing could bring back the zest of living, the mother's 
days were numbered ; and the thought came, that if 



138 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

a home was made for her that she could call her own, 
where she could have her children come as they used 
to come in the little cottage of her earlier life, there 
would appear a purpose for her living and life might 
revive again. And so she was asked whether she 
would like to have a home that she could call her 
own, where her children could come as they used to 
come, and she caught the meaning and the gladness 
of it ; in the planning and the dreaming of it, energy 
came back, and the life that was stranded, under 
love's sweet and rising tides floated on and off into 
long and happy years. 

So Castle Rest was built on the island that she 
loved ; and it was her home. There she could see 
the river flow, note the pageantry of beauty, hear the 
music of the rippling waters, the dancing leaves, 
and the sweeter music of her children's voices. 

When the leaves faded and fell around her island 
home, there was her other home, not less beautiful, 
in the midst of the great city, with every want an- 
ticipated and every luxury at hand. No emphasis 
need be placed on the costliness of her surround- 
ings, the exceeding beauty of her homes, the graceful 
architecture of Castle Rest, its amplitudes and beau- 
ties. She had rare discernment in the apprecia- 
tion of natural beauty, art, and the comforts of a 
refined and cultivated life. But she was simple- 
hearted and unostentatious. There are other mothers 



THE STORY OF A MOTHER. 



139 



who are housed in splendor, yet who are hungry- 
hearted for that which the architect cannot build 
nor the upholsterer supply. But the beauty of her 
homes and the almost royal luxuriousness of her 




living were only the smallest part of the lifelong 
tribute. I'he luxury was the gift not of ostentation 
but of love. She was worthy of all that could be done 
for her, for was she not "mother"? Back of it 
all there was a personal devotion, a personal ser- 
vice, that was more precious than anything that 
wealth could buy. It was no perfunctory sense of 
duty that brought her children back to her with 
swift and constant steps. Were she sick, the wheels 
could not turn fast enough that brought her children 
to her side ; and no cares of home were so urgent 



I40 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

as to keep the sons and daughters absent if they 
could minister to her comfort or her joy. For all 
the years in all the children's homes the mother's 
birthday was the central day in the year's calendar. 
Wherever she was, there they came as the doves to 
the windows, and with music, art, and pleasant recall- 
ings of the early days of " mother's Hfe " brought 
to her homage that a queen might have envied. 
For that hour the sons kept their brightest wit, and 
the gladness of the year centred on this festal time 
of a mother's rejoicing. 

So her life went on into extreme old age. For 
eighty-four years it unfolded, before the translation 
into the other life that grows not old. 

And then the end came ; not that the years had 
brought sorrow, that the zest of life was gone, or 
that the love that ministered grew weary, but that 
she had lived her appointed years and it was her 
time to die. 

She was not old, counting life by its higher values j 
memory, vision, sympathy, all the faculties of life 
seemed unwasted. Her love of beauty was as keen, 
her wit as bright, her appreciation of the love and 
devotion of her children as quick as it had ever 
been ; and there was something, too, in the atmos- 
phere of love and devotion in which she had lived, 
that kept the body from growing old, as the pure 
air of higher altitudes forbids decay ; and the hair 



THE STORY OF A MOTHER. 141 

was not whitened, nor the face scarred with years, 
but as she lay for burial among the flowers, she seemed 
as she was twenty years before. 

There usually is something tenderly pathetic and 
pitiful in the death of aged mothers. The long 
journey is over, and the heart-wish for love and 
sympathy has ceased. The children bring at last, 
with tardy remembrance, the flowers they should 
have brought in life, to braid them into funeral 
wreaths, while memory recalls its pleasant visions, 
and regret at a neglect, that was lack of thought and 
opportunity rather than forgetfulness, stirs the heart 
and unlocks the fountain of unavailing tears. But 
for this mother, death was not welcomed because 
life was sad. It had all been sweet and beautiful. 
The heart had been fed even more bountifully than 
the body had been housed. With every yearning for 
affection satisfied, every motherly sacrifice answered 
by children's devotion, the children would not tardily 
rise up and, above her unconscious dust, call her 
name blessed. They had walked with her through 
aU the dusty ways of life, not only to make smooth 
the highways of her pilgrimage, but to make her 
paths fragrant with love and homage. 

This is the story of this mother's life ; told not 
because she was happy beyond the lot of mothers 
in the mere appointments of outward living, but 
because motherhood, in her, received the consecra- 



142 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

tion and devotion that belong to its divinity. Uni- 
versal motherhood is honored wherever children give 
to mothers the sympathy and love which is their 
reasonable service. The last chapter of the life 
was like all the rest. Among the flowers, not of 
pride, but of affection, she was borne to burial. Ten- 
der words were simply spoken of the home-making 
mother, a song of faith was sung, and over the fields 
white with blossoms, through the opening leaves of 
spring, in one of the palatial cars which had made 
her son's name famous, she was borne westward, with 
the great fragrant cross beside her, to the old home, 
where she had lived in her early motherhood. 

There are not many villages so beautiful as the 
little town of Albion, with streets elm-arched, with 
pleasant homes, and the blue waters of the lake far 
off on the horizon's edge. Here in the cemetery fair 
and beautiful, with winding paths and verdant dales 
and hills, is the place of the abiding of her dust. 
By her children she was laid beside the husband 
from whose dying hands they had received their 
mother as a sacred trust, to love and care for till 
this hour. And here, the trust fulfilled, they laid her 
with tears and flowers, while love and memory of 
pleasant years gave glad assent to the preacher's 
word, " Who is there like a mother in all the 
earth?" 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOW. 

IN the summer of '64, I was a student in college. 
The long vacation was coming on, my home was 
far away, and I was desirous of seeing something of 
the world. I had read Taylor's "Travels in Europe," 
and had fired my youthful imagination with the per- 
ilous wanderings of Livingstone ; but I had no aspira- 
tions to be a tramp like the former, nor a missionary 
among savages of cannibal tendencies like the latter. 
A three months' tour, not too far away from home to 
be out of the way of occasional remittances, was 
about the measure of my desires ; and some light 
occupation which should not compromise my sopho- 
moric dignity, nor compel too close an intimacy with 
hard work, I thought would enable me to see some- 
thing of the world, have a good time, and put into 
my pocket a moderate balance against the casualties 
of the coming year. 

Greeley's " American Conflict " had recently been 
issued ; the people were interested in the war, and 
the book was having a large sale through the North- 
ern States. Gold was at an enormous premium ; 



144 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

and if I could sell some of these books in the prov- 
inces, and receive my pay in gold, I could transfer my 
profits into legal tenders, to my very great financial 
advantage. 

The country itself greatly fascinated me. It was a 
sort of terra incognita. I could, on a small scale, 
have a foreign tour ; the sale of an occasional book 
would hardly detract from my time or pleasure ; and 
I should not be out of the reach of the succoring arm 
of an indulgent father, if the venture in any way mis- 
carried. So to Her Majesty's Dominions, as a dis- 
seminator of ideas, I determined to go. 

But I could not go alone. I looked the boys care- 
fully over for a chum ; sounded, with all the sagacity 
of a conspirator, the most desirable ones, conceahng 
beneath vague hints and suggestions my momentous 
purpose, lest others should take the cue and become 
rivals in the profitable work of carrying the " Ameri- 
can Conflict " across the border. At last I found a 
friend after my own heart, — a good-natured, easy- 
going, mild-tempered, ingenuous youth, full of mirth, 
"a fellow of infinite jest," the ideal chum for a wild- 
goose voyage. As the young man has since become 
a reputable college professor in the old Bay State, 
and has given every evidence of having outgrown the 
follies of his youth, I shall call his name Jones. 

Our outfit was elaborate, based largely on prospec- 
tive profits, — new satchels, resplendent with straps 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 1 45 

and clasps, new clothes, morocco note-books for re- 
flections by the way, a brand-new canvassing book, with 
sample-backs pasted on the inside of the cover, an 
old trunk full of "Conflicts," a limited amount of 
cash, but high hopes ; and we set our faces toward St. 
John, New Brunswick. Men of less enterprise would 
probably have gone to a second-class hotel ; but we 
had not started out as second-class men, and nothing 
less than a front room in a leading house would sat- 
isfy our high ideas. Here I received, by previous 
arrangement, a remittance from home as a working 
capital. 

We gave a few days to the quaint old city, lingered 
on its wharves, studied the curious fashion of its ships, 
and watched with never- failing delight the hurrying 
swirl of the tides, which came pouring in like great 
floods from the Bay of Fundy. The flavor of Eng- 
lish life was delightful ; the curious houses, the quaint 
signs, the dialect of the people, the methods of busi- 
ness, the numberless oddities that stared at us from 
all the alleys and by-ways of the town, made the 
hours pass unheeded, while the obsequious servants of 
the house received our orders with becoming humil- 
ity, and our little store of sovereigns melted like 
wax in our prodigal fingers. Regularly after the 
pleasures of the day, its sentimentalisms were tran- 
scribed in bulky letters and sent across the line to 
the special young ladies who, long since having com- 



146 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

fortably married other men, shall be nameless here 
forevermore. 

A depleted treasury roused us from the delights of 
our provincial Capua. We sat down to plan the 
active work of the campaign. We took the map and 
traced the railroad Hnes. The names of the places 
were unattractive to our collegiate taste, refined by 
our intimacy with " the beauties of Ruskin," and the 
refinements of our budding " culture." At last we 
spied the name of "Sussex Vale." Here was the 
place. How visions of English scenery, the far-famed 
Sussex of Old England, came to us ! And the word 
"vale"! Why, there was poetry and music in the 
very letters of the word ! And both together, Sussex 
Vale, who could resist the combination ? " Was it a 
large place?" We did not know! "Was it a 
wealthy place ? " We did not ask! We had come 
down partially for pleasure, and there was no reason 
why " The Conflict " could not be sold as well amid 
beautiful as amid poor surroundings ! And so to 
Sussex Vale, far up the road, we went. 

A lean, long, lank, straggling town, with but few 
shops, an hotel, a few sporadic houses, and a mild 
flavor of musty decay formed the reality of the Vale, 
which had captured our youthful imagination. 

We first visited a shoemaker's shop, told our 
plain, unvarnished tale, and solicited an order. We 
got it, but it was an order to get out. " Greeley was 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 1 47 

a Yankee blackguard, the Northerners were cheats 
and cowards, and the Southerners were brave ; and 
the rebelHon would wipe out the whole confounded 
Yankee nation, and the sooner the better." To be 
candid, our first reception left nothing to be desired 
in the way of warmth. We had expected, with the 
new suits and college culture and address that distin- 
guished us, to cause some excitement, but we had not 
expected that the whole cobbling interest of the lower 
provinces would rise up at us, as it evidently seemed 
inclined to do. 

We were ready, however, for either a scrimmage or 
sale. Was I not the crack oarsman in " The Undine," 
the college boat, and did I not know that it would be 
simply impossible to put Jones out, simply from his 
vis inertice ? So in we sailed. The shoes were left 
uncobbled, while the " American Conflict " raged 
over discarded last and lapstone. 

Never did those rebel craftsmen use leather better 
tanned, or threads better waxed, than we tanned and 
waxed them, for we were fresh from the debates of 
the old "Theta Delta " and '' Zeta Psi " fraternities, 
and were as ferocious little patriots as ever for any 
purpose crossed the line of Her Majesty's Dominions. 
We were, moreover, in those intellectual horse-lati- 
tudes which intervene between a young man's fresh- 
man and sophomore years, — the period in every man's 
life when his mental powers reach the culmination 



148 IV AYS IDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

of their growth, and when his conscious wisdom 
burns with a brilhancy never afterward possible of 
attainment. 

We did not convert the cobblers, but they did not 
put us out, so we scored one for the stars and stripes, 
and went on our rejoicing way. At every house we 
found an enemy ; at the post-office we got into a per- 
fect nest of Southern sympathizers ; but we stood our 
ground, and the harder the British Lion roared, the 
more we made the Eagle scream. The Vale did 
not impress us, and we had evidently failed to im- 
press the Vale ; so at nightfall we went on to an 
adjoining town, not selected on account of the eu- 
phony of its name. It had no hotel, but a stranger 
whom we met at the depot took us home, and gave 
us the hospitalities of his house — for a consideration. 

The next day a most thorough canvass of that town 
was made. The men said " No ! " peremptorily ; and 
the women eyed us suspiciously, as they kept their 
feet against the door and thought of their silver 
spoons. Our money was getting low, and we had yet 
to sell our first book. So through village after village 
we took our weary way, the poetry of the trip gradu- 
ally being rubbed off in our contact with the sturdy 
yeomanry of Her Majesty's Dominions. 

At length we reached the little village of Hillsbor- 
ough, on the Petticodiack River, — the town where 
the famous Albert Mines are located. Here we deter- 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 1 49 

mined to make a stand and wait for reinforcements 
from home. I had previously written for remittances, 
but in the somewhat verbose answers that were 
returned not a word was said concerning funds. The 
weather was commented upon at aggravating length ; 
family affairs were discussed ; but there seemed to be 
a studied avoidance of the financial question. It was 
a big question with us, and getting bigger every day. 
At last I found it inconvenient to purchase the stamp 
necessary to send a letter home ; and in a strange 
town, bankrupt, we poor, helpless, homeless tramps 
were hopelessly entangled in a web of financial trou- 
bles. Still we were happy. Introducing ourselves as 
young collegians out seeing the world, we played 
croquet with the fair New Brunswickers, flirted with 
them on the piazzas of their cottages and sauntered 
with them during the summer evenings on the banks 
of the unromantic Petticodiack. We sang our college 
songs on the veranda of our hotel, amid the gaping 
wonder of the gamins of the village ; we were the 
heroes of village picnics, and were always booted and 
spurred for every expedition suggested by the young 
men, if after judicious inquiry we found there was no 
financial addendum to it. 

The situation had in it some elements of solemnity. 
We had been at the hotel for many days. We were 
without visible or invisible means of support. Our 
entire assets consisted of a three-cent silver piece 



I50 IV AYS IDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

soldered so effectually onto a black iron watch-chain 
that I wore that it could not be made available for 
present needs. The old folks at home had evidently 
gone back on us. We were abandoned children, — 
too honest to steal, too respectable to beg, too well- 
dressed to work, too discouraged to peddle, too lazy 
to run away. There were moments when we calmly 
reviewed the situation and put to each other the 
unsolved conundrum, "What are we going to do?" 
But our sleep was sweet, our appetites never hung fire, 
and so long as our landlord was happy, we felt that 
we had no reason to be otherwise. 

On one occasion we were on the verge of being 
scared. In the middle of the night I was awakened 
by Jones with the somewhat startling suggestion that 
he had the small-pox. I lit the lamp, and there sat 
bolt upright in bed the dumpy little tramp, broken 
out all over with what seemed to us the dreadful 
disease. We had not exactly calculated on this when 
we took the road. I gave all the comfort possible 
under the somewhat dubious circumstances ; but the 
blotches flamed out red and ominous, and the three- 
cent piece on my iron chain looked mockingly at the 
two poor, abandoned, pest-stricken pedlers of republi- 
can ideas. 

A somewhat solemn consultation with the motherly 
landlady of the house the next morning was followed 
by the welcome intelligence that it was an ordinary 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 151 

attack of the hives, — a harmless malady. There 
was not a guest at the house that ate his breakfast 
with a heartier relish that morning than Jones. 

Well, at last the way opened out of our troubles. 
We were invited to visit the Temperance Lodge, our 
friends having found out that we were members of 
the order. We were called on to speak. Jones, 
fluent of speech, rattled off a good temperance talk. 
And I having, a few weeks before leaving College, been 
engaged to make a copy of a temperance lecture by 
one of the learned Pundits of the faculty, gave them 
about a third of the Professor's most admirable and 
elegant production, which, of course, was fresh in my 
mind. The thing took. It was not often that the 
dwellers on the banks of the sluggish Petticodiack 
heard such addresses, and they wondered and were si- 
lent. We then gave them some of our college songs, 
and our stock among the temperance folks was high. 

On Saturday afternoon we addressed the Cadets, 
Jones telling some delightful stories, and I simplifying 
the second chapter of the Professor's admirable lec- 
ture. A comic song or two completed the conquest 
of the rising generation of Hillsborough. On Sunday 
the minister could hardly refrain from calling us 
out ; on Monday night we were carried by the tem- 
perance people to an adjoining town, where Jones 
fired off some temperance common-places in his 
inimitably funny way, and I concluded the Profes- 
sor's lecture. 



152 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Our fame was by this time widespread. It now 
began to serve us. In the printing-office of the place 
was a wild-eyed, long-haired, genial, good fellow, who 
aspired to the stage. Our performances had excited 
to undue activity his already inflamed ambition. Like 
all prophets he was not overburdened with the confi- 
dence of his native village ; and he saw a chance, 
through our fame, to raise himself upon the pinnacle 
of renown. He waited on us and suggested that we 
get up a grand histrionic performance in the town- 
hall. He would join his talent to ours, and we could 
be sure of an overflowing and enthusiastic house. He 
was in the heavy tragedy line himself; and we could 
sing our glees and college songs, give a few readings 
and recitations of a lighter sort, and generally lighten 
up the somewhat sombre character of his heavier 
parts. At once light broke. We mildly suggested 
that we were not actors ; that we scorned the base 
employment ; that we were gentlemen, travelling 
through the country, hoping to add to our knowledge 
of men and things by our travels, etc., etc., yet if he 
thought, etc., why, we would be willing, etc. But in 
order to keep the hall from being monopolized by the 
small boys, would it not be better to charge a nominal 
fee, say of ten cents, etc., etc. ? He thought it would, 
and so the contract was ratified then and there. He 
was to engage the hall, a piano, do all the printing, 
and we were to furnish with him the entertainment, 
and have the net Droceeds. 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 153 

His work was faithfully performed ; and the barns 
and fences for miles around were covered with the 
flaring announcement — 

"Messrs. and Jones, of the Mathetican Society, 

College, will give a Grand Literary and Musical 

Entertainment at the Town-Hall on such a night. At 
which time they will give Readings from Shakespeare, 
Recitations, Songs, Glees, etc., assisted by Hillsborough's 
well-known citizen, Mr. Blanck. Admission, ten cents." 

The night came, and with it a rush. For a long 
hour before the show, the steady line of carriages 
and foot-passengers filed by the hotel, where we sat 
grinning and winking at each other as the priests in 
Cicero's time were said to do when at their sacrifices. 
We meandered up to the hall with becoming dignity, 
and the show commenced. Jones took the floor and 
addressed the house ; stated that we had been invited 
by the culture and refinement of Hillsborough to 
give an entertainment ; that we were merely ama- 
teurs, and craved the indulgence of the people. The 
thing opened with " Upidee," with tremendous em- 
phasis upon the " rofl " of the chorus, and tremen- 
dously accelerated speed on the last verses. It took, 
and the house was gained. Then came the local 
artist. His piece was " Bernardo Del Carpio." He 
came out with light chains upon his arms, knelt be- 
fore his dead father, and with a clatter hardly excelled 



154 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

by the laughter of the prophet-stoning audience, he 
called down the maledictions of Heaven upon the 
treacherous king. We deemed it expedient to sup- 
press the ambitious prodigy after his first eifort, and 
unaided to carry on the rest of the show. We sang 
and read ; we recited, declaimed, fired off college jokes 
and made ourselves as ridiculous as two impecunious 
tramps, struggling to get out of town, would be likely 
to do, under the stimulus of popular applause, far 
away from home. One of Jones' triumphs was the 
story of " Polyphemus." " Fuss at Fires " was one of 
my star pieces. The audience could never seem to 
get enough of the words " Don't forget to yell ! " So 
when I, yielding to the impetuous encore, came out 
the second time, with that deference to popular clamor 
that marks the far-seeing actor, I interlarded the 
*' Don't forget to yell ! " with almost every sentence, 
— a thing the audience did not forget to do. 

My crowning triumph, however, was the ballad of 
^' Phebe Brown and Reuben Wright." The show 
was nearly over, the exchequer was full, we could 
leave town with flying colors, and I was laboring 
under a heavy pressure of success. The poetry of 
the piece was somewhat loose-jointed, and the story 
permitted infinite opportunity for changes and emen- 
dations ; so I interjected local hits, such as came to 
me at the moment, and improvised verses that made 
up in appropriateness what they lacked in wit and 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOfV. 155 

rhythm. The old hall rang with the clapping of 
innumerable hands and thundered with the stamping 
of the heavy heels of the miners' boots ; and flushed 
with success, unable to do the thing again, yet smiling 
sweetly and modestly, as though '' such things were 
the habit of the man," 1 would only bow, and bow, 
and bow. They thought it was modesty, but I was 
stuck. 

Jones gave the last piece, and should have dismissed 
the people ; but I had tasted the sweets of popular 
success and wanted another chance. " That vault- 
ing ambition that o'erleaps itself" impelled me to 
rush upon the platform. In tones of assured mod- 
esty I thanked the audience for their attention to 
the simple exercises of the evening, saying that if we 
had afforded them any pleasure we felt amply repaid, 
etc., and asking that we all rise and close by singing 
"God save the Queen." I knew that in Nova Scotia 
this was not an unusual custom, and supposed it was 
not here. 

If there is one thing I am not up in, it is " God 
save the Queen." To this day I don't know whether 
it has one or twenty verses. I never knew even a 
single verse in anything more than the vaguest, 
merest outline. My ignorance of the piece was ex- 
celled only by Jones, who is to-day as ignorant of 
this loyal melody as he is of Sanskrit. 

I relied on the audience, thinkinsj it would carry 



156 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

on the burden of the song. The pianist played it 
through. The audience rose, and I struck out, bold, 
strong, reliant, ** God save our gracious Queen," but 
no one struck with me. Through the rest of the 
verse I was in the agonies of extemporaneous com- 
position. Jones accompanied me loud and shrill, but 
without articulating a single word. Never did operatic 
singer mangle into a more unintelligible mass the 
words of her song than did Jones the unknown words 
of Her Majesty's melody; while with agony deep and 
prolonged, I evolved from my inner consciousness 
sentiments that I deemed appropriate for the some- 
what solemn occasion. 

Had we stopped here, my story would here end. 
The local artist who presided at the wheezy piano 
tripped off a little interlude and went on to the 
second verse. The very magnitude of the fix we were 
in, called forth all our resources. Without a smile 
we began to hum, and literally hummed the thing 
through from beginning to end. It had all the 
unity and completeness of a concerted tune, sound- 
ing much like a comb-band, without the twang of 
the loose teeth. It was the hit of the evening ; the 
audience retired in ecstasies, and no man in all that 
region ever knew that we had not, with studied effort, 
saved the best wine for the last of the feast. 

The door-keepers and our local friends followed 
us to our hotel with their congratulations. A neigh- 



THE HEROES OF ONE SHOIV. 1 57 

. boring restaurant which had not before thrived on 
V ' our patronage answered with alacrity our Uberai 
orders for cake, cream, and fruit. The friends went 
away, and the money-changers only were left. 

The bills were paid liberally ; every one who had 
contributed was generously reimbursed ; and after it 
all, we found we had a sum of money left sufficient 
to pay all our bills and with a clear record to get out 
of town. 

The next day, a responsible citizen waited on us, 
and offered a sum which seemed princely to us to go 
through the country with our exhibition. We shud- 
dered, thanked him, and declined. We had many 
occasions, before we were back again in college, to 
regret our decision ; and we have always had a linger- 
ing idea that when we declined to take the field 
as permanent minstrels, the one opportunity which 
always comes to every man once, and only once, was 
recklessly thrown away. 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL 

MAN. 

IF I had my life to live over again, and preliminary 
to my birth were offered a choice of gifts by the 
gods, instead of taking again the fatal gift of beauty 
I should surely choose the gift of confidence, — not 
that I would wish to be a confidence man, but using 
the term in the sense of assurance, or that other word 
which I cannot quite recall, which is the antithesis of 
bashfulness. Candor compels the confession that 
there is no fomily tradition of any star hovering over 
my nativity, as there was above Caesar's cradle ; but 
the good dames of the neighborhood, who assisted at 
the festivities of my inaugural, report that I lacked, 
even at my birth, the power of self-assertion ; that I 
was suffused with blushes at the start, — the abashment 
of a modest and sensitive nature at the consciousness 
of its own nakedness, for I was a parson's child and 
was born poor, without a rag to my back. 

In my early youth, with the exception perhaps of 
chilblains, my sufferings from bashfulness excelled the 
aggregated horrors of all my most cherished ailments, 
and I attribute most of my misfortunes to this im- 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 159 

pelling cause rather than to any wilful perversions or 
moral obliquities. The most optimistic of my friends 
— and in order to be friends they have to be optimis- 
tic — never gave me credit for having "the grace of a 
noble presence ; " the actors do not come to hear me, 
as they came to Whitefield, to learn the postures of 
dramatic art. I attribute it all to the bashful ness 
of an untempered youth, which refused the lessons 
of the dancing-class, which might have made me a 
model of grace and elegance of bearing. The other 
fellows, who had courage which I lacked, always went 
home with the girls I coveted, and while they saun- 
tered round by the longest way, left me to convoy 
home the wall- flowers by the short cuts. I was a 
bachelor until after twenty, because of bashfulness ; 
and if I had been one of the cripples at Bethesda's 
pool, I should certainly have been one of the '^ left- 
overs " when the troubling of the waters ceased. The 
book that I shall write on the ministry, in the slip- 
pered pantaloon of my anticipated and pleasant 
dotage, will contain a chapter on the qualifications 
of the preacher ; and while I shall say that honesty 
and piety, goodness, oratory, learning, and the sum- 
mary of all the virtues are helpers to success, I shall 
also assert that confidence, monumental and com- 
plete, — underlying, overlying, interweaving, suffus- 
ing, overflowing confidence) — is the prime essential, 
without which all a parson's " life is bound in shal- 
lows and in miseries." 



l6o JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

These are the general confessions of a bashful man. 
I will give specific instances of my humiliation. I 
attended once an Odd Fellows Picnic. It was dur- 
ing one of my earlier vacations, in one of the villages 
of Maine that is just on the outer fringes of the White 
Mountain region. I was young, and the people are 
always indulgent to youth. It was poor preaching 
that I gave them ; but I was the best croquet-player 
in the town, and they pieced out the deficiencies of 
Sunday by the skill of Monday. I had been initiated 
into the order of Odd Fellows ; and the scars of my 
ordeal were slowly disappearing when the lodge had 
a picnic on an island in the pond. I started out in 
life with a decided talent for picnics, but it was not 
encouraged. I was the parson's son, and shared in 
the utilities of the picnic rather than the pleasures, 
while the bent of my genius inclined to the frivolities 
rather than the materialities ; that is to say, if there 
was a swing to carry, I was the committee on trans- 
portation ; I climbed the trees, and hung the rope, 
and the other boys did the swinging. If the grove 
had to be raked up, the opportunity somehow came 
to me. It was felt that I had a basket-carrying talent 
which ought not to be neglected ; and if my appetite 
for ice-cream is beyond that of my contemporaries, it 
is because while their youth was devoted to emptying 
the freezers, mine was spent in turning them. I had 
an accident once, too, at a picnic, which depressed 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. l6l 

me. It is not necessary to particularize, except to 
say that it was in the era of white pants and short 
jackets without skirts, and that it happened through 
jumping off a beam. It was not serious, but small 
accidents disconcert a bashful boy ; and really, being 
pinned up with a handkerchief and having to give up 
the picnic, and back half the way home, was not a 
thing to enamour one of picnics. 

Still, I went to the Odd Fellows Picnic because it 
was expected and the fees of my initiation had been 
remitted. They had a dinner, and were then to have 
some speaking. Nothing had been said to me about 
remarks ; but I felt it in the lurid air of that summer 
day that I was to be the orator of the festival. It 
came to me that by omitting the closing dainties of 
the feast I could take a boat and row off on the pond, 
and inadvertently get detained until after the ad- 
dresses ; and so with a chance companion I started 
out. It was one of those quiet days when the surface 
of the water was like a polished mirror. The boat 
was hard, the sun was hot, the passenger was not the 
one at all that would have been taken if I had fled 
for companionship ; but I rowed and rowed, turning 
deaf ear to all the blowing horns that called me back, 
haunting the remotest indentations, keeping behind 
concealing islands, fostering unrealizable anticipa- 
tions in the spinster heart of my companion, all that 
I might keep away until the addresses might be con- 



1 62 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

eluded. I rowed around the pond until I could 
almost hear the frying of my brains in the tropic 
heat ; and only when I made assurance doubly sure 
did I return, to hear, as my keel grated on the beach, 
the pleasant words, " You are back just in time. 
Your name has just been called ! " 

I have never had the consciousness of having un- 
earned money in my pocket, — in fact, money earned 
or unearned has not greatly bothered either conscious- 
ness or pocket, — but I have for many years had a 
feeling that once at least in my checkered life I had 
received money for which I had given no adequate 
return. It happened in this way. 

There was a town in Maine, where in the days of 
my early ministry I had many friends. I had dedi- 
cated the Masonic Hall with an address ; I had 
preached the sermon at the dedication of the church ; 
I had spoken at a picnic ; and when the occasion 
came for the first celebration of the town on Decora- 
tion Day, who so fit to make the oration as the rising 
parson, who was settled on the sea- board fifty miles 
away? If I remember rightly, the father of the lady 
who was in the boat on the picnic day was the chair- 
man of the committee, and it may have been that this 
was a factor in my selection ; at any rate, I was 
asked to come and give the oration, and would be 
paid a goodly sum. It has been the misfortune of a 
life of many imprudences that the abnormal amiabil- 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 1 63 

ity which has been my bane always prompted me to 
promise services which were remote. If I were in- 
vited, by a friend whom I esteemed, to be hanged in 
thirty days' time, I should doubtless accept the invi- 
tation, although I should probably be sorry for it when 
the time matured. 

I accepted the invitation, and spent the intervening 
time in getting ready for the effort of my life. Not 
to go too elaborately into the psychological secrets of 
bashfulness, it may be remarked, as this is a chapter 
of confessions, that a nature which is weak in confi- 
dence is strong in sentiment ; and so I selected for 
my theme, " Heroism." The style was of the com- 
posite order, with a little of the efflorescence of the 
Byzantine period. The mythologies were enlisted, 
and the poets made tributary to the general effect ; 
the classics added their color to the masterpiece ; and 
Emerson and Carlyle, Ruskin and the later essayists, 
helped to make a rhetorical composition which would 
have delighted the heart of the teachers who correct 
the compositions in the ninth grade. 

Well, the eventful day came. I was in the first 
barouche, which was designated in the programme as 
carrying "the orator of the day." The procession 
formed at the village square, and was something after 
this order as I remember it. The marshal, in cotton 
gloves (with other clothing, of course), the, village 
band, un-uniformed veterans, barouche with " the 



1 64 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

orator of the day," accompanied by the selectmen, sec- 
ond barouche with resident ministers, — all sullen that 
the appropriation for oratory was not going to home 
talent, — other carriages containing citizens more or 
less distinguished, hay wagon trimmed with garlands, 
containing school children representing the " Nation's 
Hope," another band from a rival town, yeomanry in 
wagons, other yeomanry of inferior social grade on 
foot, small boys and cripples, — this was about the way 
of it. The marshal was about as ubiquitous as his 
horse, whose normal place was the hay-field rather 
than the field of war, would permit. The line of 
march was from the band- stand at the top of the hill 
to the graveyard ; and the procession must have been 
as much as five minutes in passing a given point. In 
my younger days I was naturally of an observing turn ; 
and before we reached the graveyard I began to think 
that perhaps *' Heroism " was not exactly the subject 
best calculated to shake the hayseed out of the hearts 
of the auditory that I should have. The ride out was 
pleasant. None of us are unsusceptible to fame, and 
every one likes to ride in the first carriage in any pro- 
cession, — unless it is a funeral procession ; and I 
was not only human, but I was " the orator of the 
day," so catalogued in the programme. 

By the time we reached the graveyard I was sorry 
that I was not to be left there. It would have been 
so sweet to die for one's country, or for anybody's 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 165 

country. Only to die and be at rest ! Not to have to 
go back; to stop being "the orator of the day" then 
and there ; to be a mute though inglorious Milton ! 
Well, the soldiers spread their flowers, the children 
sang their songs, the marshal pulled up his white 
gloves and turned around his fiery untamed, and we 
moved, oh, how swiftly, to the place of my humilia- 
tion ! If only to be an orator was to sit with the 
selectmen and look unconscious-like and self-pos- 
sessed, as though one spent his time in barouches ; to 
see fond mothers lift their children up to catch a 
sight, that they could tell of it to their children's 
children, — in short, to be '' the orator of the day " is 
not so bad ; but one must speak if he is to be an 
orator, and there 's the rub. Well, we reached the 
town-hall, and I alighted. Followed by the clergy, as 
though I was going to my execution, I led the pro- 
cession to the moderator's box. The band played ; 
the children in arms wailed for the solitudes of the 
farm whence they came ; and the chairman of the day 
introduced me with flattering remarks. It was no 
Ruskin-loving crowd that was before me ; they had 
no hunger for finer shadings of rhetorical antithesis, 
and I knew it. Had I been other than a bashful 
man I should have let the classic figures rest, and 
have stood out before the people, and " made Rome 
howl;" unloosed the American Eagle, and set him 
flying over that bucolic multitude, told the story of 



1 66 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the war, and made the welkin ring with patriotic 
platitudes. But, alas for speaker and hearer ! I was 
a bashful man ; and with a sense of humiliation which 
was like a nightmare, I spread out my double quire 
of perforated paper, and gave the mythologies of all 
the heathen gods. And the children cried, and I 
envied them that they could find solace in their tears ; 
and the mothers trotted them, and cursed the mad- 
ness that had made them seek the excitements of the 
giddy town ; and the hired men shook the hayseed 
from their hair with their involuntary noddings ; and 
the chairman looked wise as chairmen always do, and 
was bored as chairmen sometimes are ; while the 
clergy were alert with puzzlings as to where the quo- 
tations were stolen from, having a kind of tiger- like 
defiance in their eyes that said to us, " We shall of 
course stand by you if there are any demonstrations." 
I have the oration yet. The blue ribbon is faded 
some ; but I keep it, as the martyrs used to keep the 
scourges with which they had been beaten. I was 
not mobbed, but I should have been. The audience 
was somnolent rather than aggressive. I made it 
short, and hurried the heroes of the ages at a faster 
pace than Hood's pauper was hurried to his illustrious 
grave. There were no children held up to see " the 
orator of the day." The clergy congratulated me with 
their lips, while they whispered prayers that they 
might be forgiven for the falsehood ; the chairman 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 167 

excused himself; the selectmen deserted me; the 
adulation of the earlier hours had spent itself; and the 
meanest of the heroes I had described was happier 
than I, because he was dead, and I was yet alive with 
the memory of my humiliation. 

I had engagements in the village for several days, 
but I went from the town-house directly to the stable, 
ordered my horse, and in an hour's time was five 
miles away. I vowed that night that when the 
money came I would return it. But I was very busy 
and neglected to send it back ; but not a hall or 
church have I dedicated since that day in that pleas- 
ant town, where I was once supreme, nor have I ever 
been asked again to come and serve them as " the 
orator of the day." 

The opinion holds sometimes, in circles otherwise 
intelligent, that a minister is full of speeches, and is 
always on tap ; that an introduction turns the faucet, 
and the speeches come by some mysterious law of 
loquacious gravitation. Every minister has his own 
little humiliations of this sort when he has been called 
upon for the '' few remarks," the presentation of the 
prize medals, and the -' surprise " to the teacher, who 
is not surprised. 

I went to Greenwood once upon a Decoration Day, 
as a guest, I supposed, with no thought that I was to 
say a word ; and only when, half an hour late, I 
reached the place, did I learn that I was booked to 
speak. It was not half a minute between the time 



1 68 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

of the discovery and the address. I hope that I 
acquitted myself with honor, but I am not sure. I 
can remember as well the substance of any other 
nightmare as I can recall the horrors of that speech ; 
and it can be recalled now as well as it ever could be, 
for when the last sentence was finished and the 
reporter insinuatingly asked, '' Will you give me the 
notes of your oration? " I indignantly and bewilder- 
ingly replied, " Why, man alive, I don't know a word 
that I have said ! " 

I was called upon once to present some bridal pres- 
ents to a happy pair ; and having no advisement of 
it, and being, as I have said, a bashful man, I be- 
gan to hand over all the things that were in the 
region roundabout, and had with much elaboration 
presented the piano before I was told that the local 
furniture was not among the gifts. 

I had in mind to say that the latest humiliation that 
had come to me as a bashful man was at a recent meet- 
ing of a Boston club. But then all the humiliations 
of my life are always new and never old. The first 
seems to be a thing of yesterday ; and times and sea- 
sons bring no forgetfulness to these larger mortifica- 
tions, which are the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. I had been invited not once but thrice to 
this association of worthies. I had prepared a paper 
years before and came on to Boston with it ; but a 
friend who knew my weakness kindly died that I 
might be summoned home, and so the day of my 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 1 69 

humiliation was postponed. I had declined again 
and again with thanks, and pleaded work and refused, 
until it were ungracious longer to decline, and so at 
last I went. 

The genial clerk who sent the invitations out, being 
optimistic in his temper, had promised an able paper. 
Of course he was not in my confidence, and did the 
thing to get the brethren there and collect the little 
arrearages that were hanging fire. I had an experi- 
ence once in a Long Island town. I was to lecture for 
the benefit of the library. The subject of my lecture 
was something like the Art of Making Manhood, but 
the presiding officer had some mental twist, and in- 
troduced me with an elaborate description of my 
"Travels in the galleries of Europe, where I had 
studied the masterpieces of human art, which I would 
describe to the audience, from which he begged kind 
indulgence." 

Well, if I went to Boston for a supper I did not get 
it ; and if my plate was paid for, it was clean profit to 
the house. As an anti-appetizer, a speech, or even a 
paper before a Boston club, is a conspicuous success. 
In an elaborate study of this subject, it is proved to a 
demonstration that the big eaters are always put on 
to make the speeches in order to save the victuals. I 
have seen gormandizers of celebrity made as abstinent 
as monks in Lent simply by the intelligence that 
they would be expected to make a few remarks. 



I/O IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES, 

If old and hardened fellows are thus affected, 
what would be the natural effect upon a young and 
bashful man, who had been reared to think that 
Boston is the seat of culture, where every man is born 
a critic, and the pocket-knife in the pocket of every 
preacher is a lance to dissect the failings of weaker 
brothers ? It would hardly be a fact to say that it 
was a night of revelry, or that Boston had gathered 
there her beauty and her chivalry. I might perhaps 
have represented the *' shiveralry," but it would be hard 
to locate the beauty without invidious distinctions. 
But at any rate, if the American House had collapsed 
and become as the baseless fabric of a dream, some 
honored institutions of Boston and vicinity would have 
had hard sledding for a time. 

One likes his friends generally, but not always. 
Imagination is a strong element in a bashful man ; 
and while, on the night I am trying to describe, I 
was busy toying with the menu, I could invest the 
gentlemen around me with the associations of other 
days. Not ten feet from me was the honored ex- 
President, from whom in other days we used to get 
those "private admonitions," which were always 
deserved but seldom appreciated. In the midst 
of friendly chat I feared that he might remark to 
me that " after the reading of the paper he would 
like to see me in the President's office, to explain 
that little problem in physics, as to how the pump- 



THE CONFESSIONS OF A BASHFUL MAN. 1 7 1 

kins were carried into the chapel, or the college cow 
precipitated into the neighboring reserv^oir." 

It was whispered to me that I should be expected 
to have a " characteristic paper ; " and when I asked 
what that meant, I was given to understand that 
it meant that I would " make it funny for the boys," 
though it was not put that way ; and there before 
me, not forty feet away, was the Cambridge wit 
whose stories have wide currency. There was the 
Latin teacher not far off, who used to sit beside me 
in the class-room ; and I could almost feel across 
the interval of twenty years the motion of an elbow, 
which meant a little help on that tough sentence 
in the ode of Horace, though it is not for me to 
say who owned the elbow and who owned the rib. 
There is the editor who knows good English : and 
three chairs away is the white-haired professor who 
has a scent for a mis-pronunciation like that of an 
Andover visitor for heresy ; there is the professor 
of English literature, who is man enough, unless he 
has become corrupted by his associations, to stand 
up at the close of the coming trouble and say that 
" he had me for many years in charge and taught 
me all I know, and will the rioters in simple justice 
be kind enough to throw the missiles in his direction." 
And parsons ! — why, they are as thick, in numbers 
I mean, as the leaves in Vallombrosa. Parsons to 
right of us, parsons to left of us ! Editors, parish 



1/2 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

committees one of these days to be looking for 
" talent," a professor of modern languages directly 
opposite, so near that I can kick him for being 
here if I want to, — and I do, — and then just there 
at the left, where there is no escaping his basilisk 
gaze, is the old professor of mathematics. I used to 
like him, though I never told my love. He was the 
most genial and patient of men. Had he not been 
a saint, I should not be sitting here to-night ; for I 
should have been the righteous victim of his wrath, 
and he would have been hung for murder. I had 
hardly seen him for twenty years, and the conscience 
which makes cowards of us all doubtless somewhat 
affected me ; but I was in mortal terror through all 
the inquisition lest he might quietly remark, in those 
ominous blood-curdling words which have haunted 
me for all the years, "Mr. G., you may go to the 
board and put on the fourth problem." Well, these 
are only part of them ; the room was full of them. It 
seemed as if — 

" The souls of all that I had murdered 
Came to my tent ; and every one did threat 
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of Richard." 

And so with that old, familiar, and fearful trepida- 
tion in the knees, I threw myself on the mercy 
of the court, hoping that it would be indulgent to 
a bashful man ; and when I say that I was not 
mobbed, it will be apparent that it was. 



THE SHADOW SIDE. 



AS I look from my window at my neighbor's 
yard, I notice that while on the sunward side 
the snow has disappeared and the grass is green, 
beneath the windows that look northward the winter 
yet lingers. There are trailing vines and blooming 
plants in the windows on the sunny side, and chil- 
dren's faces are at the panes ; and when the twilight 
comes there is a glow of firelight on the hearth and 
all the little tokens of a sweet home-life. But I have 
never seen children's faces at the panes upon the 
shadow side ; indeed, there are double windows there 
against the winter winds. 

If it is true, as the poet says, that 

" In the grasses sweet voices talk," 

I wonder what will be the speech of the grass that yet 
lingers in its winter sleep beneath the belated snows. 
Will it not lament that luxuriant growth is denied 
it ; and will it not grow sour with disappointment that 
its roots are anchored in the shadow rather than the 
sunshine ? 

Every life has its shadow side. Naaman was a 
mighty man in valor, but he was a leper. Saul was 



174 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Israel's king, but the people were singing David's 
praises beneath his palace windows. Haman was 
the king's favorite, but Mordecai refused to pay 
obeisance. 

David was poet and king, but there was the spec- 
tre of his remembered crime. Solomon was rich with 
wisdom and the wealth of Ophir, but life was vanity of 
vanities. Peter was mighty among those who wrought 
wonders and subdued kingdoms, but in memory's 
chambers there were the echoes of the crowing of the 
cock. Among men none save Christ has wrought so 
largely in shaping the world's life as the Saul who was 
called Paul, but there was " the thorn in the 
flesh." 

There is no joy comparable to that of literary crea- 
tion. Out of the airy realm of the imagination to call 
forth invisible spirits, clothe them with living vestures, 
and make them unweave the tragedies and comedies 
of life ; to give voice and speech to the dumb music 
that is in men's souls ; to follow the elusive trails in 
which thought runs ; to braid together the threads of 
fact and fancy ; to weave words into literature, — there 
is in all the world no joy that equals the ecstasy of the 
mind's creative work. Rut. " except the Newgate 
Calendar," says Carlyle, " the biography of authors is 
the most sickening chapter in the history of man." 

Milton writes the "Defence of Liberty," but his 
sightless eyes shall not see the laurels of his fame. 



THE SHADOIV SIDE. 175 

Goldsmith, Coleridge, De Quincey, Scott, Lamb, 
Leigh Hunt, Poe, Dickens, Carlyle, — every one has 
life's shadow side. Seven cities shall contend for 
Homer dead, not one for Homer living ; and though 
Florence shall make merchandise of Dante's fame, 
there is no sadder sight in all the tragedies of litera- 
ture than the exiled Dante going upon the hills and 
turning his hungering eyes toward Florence, which 
he could not enter. 

The light fell with soft entrancement on Newstead 
Abbey, which was the poet's home ; what other gifts 
could the gods give to this one, who had music for 
every song and an art to mirror Nature in all her 
moods? But there was the club-foot ! 

Hawthorne shall write the finest romance in 
American literature, but the pendulum of high ecsta- 
sies swings into mental depressions which are as 
night's thick blackness. When the grass grows long 
on the graves of the prophets, men gather the stones 
which crushed them and build them into the monu- 
ments of their enduring fame ; but the only monument 
the prophets saw was the martyr's stake, and they 
died feeling that they were only 

" The idle singers of an empty day." 

So on life's lower levels every home has its shadow 
side ; and every life has somewhere, in the seasons of 
its unfolding, " the winter of its discontent." '' I 



1/6 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

cannot say," said the pastor of wide experience, 
" whether among the rich or poor I have found most 
unhappiness." There are heartaches as heavy in 
boudoirs as under the rafters of hovels ; and within 
closets carved with rich traceries of art there are skele- 
tons that lay burdens on hearts that beat with heaviness 
beneath costliest fabrics. " Every heart knoweth its 
own bitterness, and no stranger intermeddleth with 
its joy." 

But every life has also its sunny side. Some one 
has said that life has two handles, — a bright one and 
a dark one, — and it is for us to say by which we will 
take hold of it. I used to go to see a poor mis- 
shapen, crippled boy. He was seldom free from 
pain ; but out of his multiplied infirmities he had 
distilled a sweetness of spirit that made his cripple's 
chair a place of beauty, and his prison-chamber a 
place of brightness. He was never morose, never 
down-hearted, never felt that his life had a shadow 
side, because the brightness of his large faith and 
sweet content made even the darkness light about 
him. I was in one day to see him ; and after his 
paroxysm of pain was over, and his face had taken on 
again its familiar smile, I said to him, '' Well, you 
do have a hard time of it ! " and with a look of 
wondering surprise he said, " Why, no ; this is noth- 
ing to what it would be if I was blind ! " There 
was just that little patch of sunshine in his life, — the 



THE SHADOIV SIDE. 177 

fact that he was not bUnd ; and in that he stayed, 
and refused to go around on Hfe's other side where 
the shadows were. And in my searchings round the 
world I never found one who has so well found the 
philosophy of life as that crippled boy. 

It was a hard stint we had before us, — to ride for 
two long days over the crest of the Rocky Mountains, 
on the bags and baggage that were on the top of the 
old stage. There were a good round dozen of us, and 
we had all been bred to gentle usage. 

But there was no alternative ; and we could increase 
inevitable discomfort with our laments, or we could 
make our journey with mirth and laughter and such 
imaginings as would change it into a delight. x\nd 
so we mounted to our place of torture with such 
smiles as we could summon ; and we took our 
bruises not with grumbling or with a stoic's silence, 
but with laughter, as though each scar was a badge 
of honor, and every laceration was a caress. It took 
much imagination and great stores of philosophy ; but 
we loaned our laughs for one another's needs, and kept 
good-hearted, and so made the journey, which else 
had been a torture, with such sweet endurance and 
pleasant comfortings that now, when the bruises all 
are healed, we find in memory a sweet residuum of 
pleasant recollections. 

The Hindoos tell the story of the man who had 
such rare art of divination that he could always see 



178 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the soul of good in things evil. One day, to test 
him, they stopped with him beside the dead body of 
a dog, and his friend with disgust and bitterness 
spoke of it ; but the wise man said, '^ But oh, how 
white his teeth are ! " 

If I remember rightly it was Southey who tells us 
of the woman that he met in one of his walks, who 
was so optimistic in her views of life that she had 
unquestioning faith that " whatever is, is right." 
He made to her the rather obvious remark that it 
was dreadful weather; to which she answered that 
" in her opinion any weather was better than none." 

Sydney Smith somewhere says that the secret of 
happiness consists in taking short views of things. 
We are cursed by our imaginations. The iron of 
the dentist's forceps is not half so hard as our an- 
ticipations made it, although no one would assert 
that its caressings are as pleasant as the arms of 
the houris of Mahomet's heaven. The water of the 
river in which we used to swim always was colder 
when we shivered on its banks than when we swam 
in its currents ; and the physicians say that the pain 
of dying is not half so great as the dread of it. 

After all, our estimates of life are relative. " A one- 
eyed man is king among the blind ; " and it is well 
for us, in choosing our standards, to look down and 
not up. We envy the richer man, whose liveried foot- 
men sneer at us. Do we not know that, thousrh we 



THE SHADOIV SIDE. 1 79 

drive our own modest equipage, the man who owns 
the mule envies us our horse ; and the man who 
walks envies the man his mule ; and the lame man 
envies the man who can walk ; and the man who is 
without legs would be content to be lame if only he 
had legs at all? 

There is a story somewhere of the wise man in 
abject want, who was eating some garden stuff which 
he had picked up ; and he said to himself, ^' Surely 
there is no one in the world more poor and wretched 
than I am ; " and he turned and beheld another man 
eating the leaves which he had thrown away. 

I was sick and weary-hearted with over-burden of 
my cares, and I went and sat in the home of an aged 
woman whom I had known long and well, and with 
querulous complainings I was bewailing my weariness ; 
and as I talked I looked upon the wall before me, 
and there I saw the pictures of six stalwart sons to 
manhood grown, every one of whom had gone away 
from this mother's home to sail upon the sea, and 
one by one had been lost upon the deep. And in 
the face of the larger sorrows of this sunny-hearted 
woman, who was thanking God by day and night for 
the faithful daughter that remained, how small and 
petty, yea, how wicked, seemed my little sorrows ! 

Oh, but this staying on the sunny side of the 
house, instead of living on the shadow side of life, is 
the very art and philosophy of living. How much 



l8o JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

does the art of seeing the sunny side of things do to 
make Hfe go smoothly ! There are Aunty Dolefuls 
whose coming into the home so darkens Ufe that we 
have to raise the curtains to see our work. There 
are physicians whose countenances increase the tem- 
perature and quicken the pulse. We do not wonder 
that Charles Lamb loved Jem White and lamented 
when he died because half the gayety and sunshine of 
the world had gone. 

Sunniness of temper is the mark of a gentleman ; 
and it was a wise test of a gentleman which Thack- 
eray puts into the mouth of one of his waiters when 
he makes him say, " Oh, I knew he was a gentle- 
man, he was so easily pleased." Life is not all 
shadow nor is it all sunshine, but it has its sunny and 
its shadow side ; and often it is for us to say whether 
we will live on the sunny side, where the grass grows 
green and the flowers bloom, or on the shadow side, 
where the winter lingers yet with its snows and frosts. 
Often where the shadows are we can bring such 
inward sunshine of the spirit that even the shadows 
may flee away. And this resource is left to us, — to 
endure the burdens with a courage that shall make 
them light. Paul prayed God to take away the 
thorn; and God refused because he wished to do a 
better thing for Paul, and so He gave him strength 
to bear the pain. 

What a beautiful story is that of the gentleman 



THE SHADOIV SIDE. l8l 

who, visiting the deaf and dumb asylum, wrote this 
question on the board, " Why did God make you 
deaf and dumb, and made me to speak? " The eyes 
of the httle ones filled with tears ; it was a great mys- 
tery ; their cleverness knew no answer. Their faith 
solved it. One went to the board and wrote, " Even 
so. Father, for so it seemeth good in thy sight." So 
if there is no way out of the shadow side of life, if the 
burden will not drop, there is left for us the sweet 
assurance that " My grace is sufficient for you ; " and 
so because the shadow seemeth good for us by Him 
who in love has appointed the ways of life, we may 
know that somewhere in the heart of the sorrow there 
is the hiding of a blessing which will at some time be 
revealed. 



WITH THE RANK OF CAPTAIN. 

WE never knew just how it happened ; but there 
the commission was, signed and sealed, 
making us Chaplain of the corps, " with the rank of 
Captain." If we had the rank, we surely had the 
title ; and so we were to be called Captain ! We had 
never dreamed it ! 

Our antecedents were ecclesiastical rather than 
military. There was a rumor that on the maternal 
side we had come in direct descent from Elder 
Brewster. But the elder was a preacher, not a sol- 
dier. There were traditions, too, of a certain an- 
cestor on the Cape, who had held important military 
rank in the good old colony days ; but the annals 
were not clear, and the impression held that the 
ancestors had wrought their deeds in other fields 
than those of war. Still, it ought to be said that our 
genius is not of the genealogical order. We have 
always maintained that when one has traced the 
family back far enough to get a fairly good ancestor, 
it is wise to stop. He may go farther, and fare 
worse. There was nothing in our own youth to in- 



IVITH THE RANK OF CAPTAIN. 1 83 

dicate a military career. Of course, no one can tell 
what his biographer may find ; but our own remem- 
brance gives no stronger hint of military leanings than 
the fact that on one disastrous June training- day, in 
our early adolescence, we peddled lozenges on the 
muster-field, — the incident being impressed on us 
from the fact that the sales were as poor as were 
the confections which we were subsequently obliged 
to eat. We had, of course, paraded in the Cadets 
of Temperance ; but that was a social company 
with a reform attachment, and was neither militant 
nor triumphant. 

We had served briefly in the War of the Rebellion. 
The service was brief, — but three weeks in length. 
It was not hard, as the hotel where we boarded had 
a good table, and we went home nights. We could 
not get the parental signature to the enlistment 
blanks, and so were mustered out before we were 
mustered in. That is the reason why until the pres- 
ent we have been without a military record. And 
now, by this blessed commission, we were appointed 
" Chaplain, with the rank of Captain." No working 
up from low subalternism, but jumped as it were 
from private station to a post of honor, — a kind of 
second Cincinnatus business of going from the plough 
to the throne, although of course we never had a 
plough and have no throne, although we hold the 
Captain's rank. 



1 84 IV AYS IDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

It may be necessary to remark to those who are 
not connected with the regular army or the State 
miUtia that a mihtary commission is not only the 
designation to an office, but is a command to the 
officer's subordinates to obedience ; and so following 
the appointment "with the rank of Captain," ap- 
peared the words, ''and he is to be respected and 
obeyed as such." 

We have never had the lust of power ; but, to put 
it mildly, we were pleased at the new title that had 
come. To be called Captain, instead of parson, 
dominie, elder, and doctor, was a relief if not a pro- 
motion. To be respected as a captain was delight- 
ful ; to be obeyed as a captain was blissful. The 
only thing lacking which the colonel omitted in send- 
ing the commission was a military guard to execute 
the order. We read the document with every variety 
of inflection and intonation ; but even in our own 
family, where we were measurably obeyed as a hus- 
band, we were derided as a captain. We told the 
colonel of it ; he sadly smiled, and said that the same 
condition existed in his own home. It was one of 
the effects of a lack of military background. 

Well, the first campaign came. The march was 
not hard from the armory to the depot where the 
corps embarked. Of course, a soldier's first march 
is always trying ; but the springs of the cab in which 
we rode were easy, and the driver went by the 



IVITH THE RANK OF CAPTAIN. 1 85 

smoothest streets. Philadelphia was reached in good 
form ; the mayor received us, and we were dismissed 
for parade at two o'clock. While we are waiting for 
the fateful hour, it may be said that the corps on 
whose staff we were an officer more or less distin- 
guished, "with the rank of Captain," is not included 
in the State or National Guard, but is one of those 
pleasant social companies like the Old Guard, the 
Ancient and Honorable Artillery, the Putnam Pha- 
lanx, and kindred organizations. The members are 
gentlemen ; their campaigns are bloodless ; there are 
many banquets but no battles; dehghtful compan- 
ionships are created ; and incidentally the military 
spirit is fostered by the picturesque continental 
uniform, the striking military marches, and the mar- 
tial music. Nearly all the great cities which the 
company has visited have welcomed it with enthu- 
siasm, and the annual field-days and excursions have 
been memorable. 

At two o'clock we were in line, the " Chaplain, 
with the rank of Captain," among the staff. We had 
never been in uniform before ; before the day was 
over, we vowed internally and externally that we 
would never be in it again. And yet the uniform 
was very striking and becoming. 

A swallow- tailed -coat, with bright brass buttons ; a 
vest with buttons also bright ; cocked hat and plume ; 
white kid or cotton gloves surmounted with the 



1 86 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



jauntiest lace ; with touches of buff, and straps and 
fixings, velvet breeches, and boots immaculate with 
yellow tops. 
lB> Altogether the uniform in mil- 

^3L itary circles would be called 

^Hilg*^ " striking," in female parlance 

^*^^ * "lovely," in the realm of dude- 

dom "swell." Every man in 
the ranks knew this, and this was 
why the wives were happy to 
have their husbands join the 
corps. The Chaplain's uniform 
was not quite so fascinating as 
that of the other men : but while 
the sombre proprieties were ob- 
served, it recognized the fact 
that preachers are human, and 
the names of their wives are 
Vanity. The hat was not tipped 
with quite so rakish a pitch ; 
the buff decorations were used 
sparingly; the top-boots gave 
way to shoes ; the frills and ruf- 
fles were less abundant, though 
judiciously administered they 
could be made quite effective. 
We confess that when we stood for the first time in 
our place, in the corridors of the hotel, preliminary to 




IVITH THE RANK OF CAPTAIN. 1 8/ 

marching orders, we were abashed by the gravity of 
our honors and the ridiculousness of our clothes. 
We could stand the swallow-tail, and were oblivious 
of the cocked hat because we could not see it. But 
the knee-breeches and the stockings were the source 
of our humiliation. We had hitherto been fully 
dressed, and the sight of our own unsheltered, undis- 
guised extremities abashed us. We simply were not 
used to it ; we were, so to speak, the slave of the 
conventional, and we missed, oh, how we missed our 
customary costume on the long, long march through 
the streets of the Quaker City ! 

The march began. We had never kept step with 
mortal man before. We got the wrong foot first, and 
half the time were hitching up a lost step, like an 
interfering horse. The gamins followed along the 
sidewalks, and the factory girls applauded from the 
windows ; the other members of the staff marched 
like veterans, while the Chaplam, outwardly assuming 
a hero's m.ien, inwardly wished he had worn his 
other shoes and had on his longer pants. But the 
band of forty pieces played the tunes the Chaplain 
liked ; and if there had not been the spectres beneath 
of the ribbed stockings moving in and out, his heart 
would have been happy. Well, the longest march 
even in knee-breeches must end at last ; and in the 
armory of the State Fencibles, who were the hosts, the 
corps was entertained with lavish hospitality. 



1 88 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

The striking uniform of the company is easily car- 
ried when many are together, but when one wearing 
it is alone, he is usually taken as an escaping freak 
from some dime museum. With this uniform on, 
there is only safety in numbers. We did not know 
it then. We are now sure of it. 

Well, the boys were tarrying at the banquet. We 
felt homesick for our normal clothes and sighed for 
our satchel. It was fairly dark as we started for the 
hotel a dozen blocks away. 

The blocks in Philadelphia are miles in length, and 
the city evidently has the best electric lights upon the 
continent. Why, every vest-button seemed like a 
calcium light, and the brasses on the swallow-tail were 
like the headlights of a locomotive. The streets had 
no shadow side, and the whole town was out that 
night. 

Dante has described a trip through purgatory, and 
the particulars of that evening's journey can be omitted. 
We will give but one incident as a kind of sample 
brick. We were getting along fairly well, trying to 
keep the ribbed stockings as much in the shadow as 
the shop-windows and the electric lights would permit. 
A wicked, wizened little Quaker, who ought to have 
been at home like an honest man, trotted up beside 
us, and looked at us while he trotted. Pretty soon he 
said, in a little drab-colored piping voice, " My friend, 
that is a very beautiful and picturesque costume you 



IVITH THE RANK OF CAPTAIN. 189 

have on, but I hardly think you will be able to get 
the world to put it on again." This was the last 
humiliation. We could stand the jeers of the gamins 
and the admiration of the factory girls, the sarcastic 
interrogations of the irreverent as to the name of 
the museum where we " held out ; " but to be taken 
for a dress reformer, a kind of mascuhne Mrs. 
Bloomer, was to fill the cup to the overflow, and 
make us regret that we had ever accepted the rank 
of Captain. 

We could go no farther. The ribbed stockings 
refused to move. The Captain turned and looked at 
the shrivelled-up remnant of expiring Quakerdom, 
and as he held him by the button, said in a voice 
meant to be admonitory, " My friend, if you are as 
much of a Quaker as you seem to be, and the Quakers 
are as kind as they are said to be, you will keep still 
about my clothes. I know they look pretty bad, 
but they ain't a circumstance to the way I feel." 

The Quaker disappeared, and we jogged on more in 
sorrow than in anger. But somehow the solitary 
march that night disenchanted us of our dreams of 
military glory, and took away much of the pride we 
had when we were commissioned "Chaplain, with 
the rank of Captain." 



THE STUDENT'S WORKSHOP. 

IT is not easy to dissociate historic from intrinsic 
beauty, and to tell to which it is that a place 
owes its magic charm, A simple field ripens its 
harvests all unnoticed until a poet crosses it and drops 
beside its paths the broken garlands of his song, and 
ever after it is a place of pilgrimage ; the singer carols 
his song beside " ye banks and braes o' Bonny 
Doon," and henceforth the grass-grown walks become 
worn with footsteps ; in the quaint churchyard at 
Stoke Pogis, Gray writes his immortal elegy, and 
those who pass unvisited the proud castle on the hill 
beyond have time to linger here beneath the yew- 
tree's shade and talk of that to which all greatness 
comes, as they muse among the graves. At Oxford, 
Addison's Walk is visited, though the famous races in 
the outskirts are unseen ; while the study of the 
Wizard of the North at Abbotsford arrests the steps 
of those whom Holyrood is powerless to hold. 

The magic hand of Longfellow touched the httle 
Minnesota Falls and changed them into the " Laugh- 
ing Waters ; " the poets have found the old legends 



THE STUDENTS WORKSHOP. 191 

of Yosemite, so that now the gentle Merced sings 
its old-time ballads to El Capitan, and hallows the 
valley with the presence of invisible spirits ; the 
Yellowstone Park excels Yosemite in grandeur of 
wonders, but no poet has woven over its brilliant 
canyons the gossamer of his legendary songs, and the 
great world not yet has turned to its holy shrines the 
feet of worshippers. Disraeli and the many others 
who have written of the life and history of authors 
have said but little of the places where men have 
written the great masterpieces of literature. Scott's 
study remains as it was when he laid down the sov- 
ereign pen: but how little we know of the places 
which men would make into shrines if only they 
knew where they were. From the works of many of 
the great writers the outlook from the windows can 
be learned, because the outward surroundings in- 
sensibly register themselves upon one's thought. We 
know that Tennyson looked upon the sea while he 
wrote, for the beating waves have left their music in 
the rhythm of his verse ; sunny Nature touched the 
novelist's study table at Gad's Hill, for its shining suns 
have gilded the beauty of his creations ; the moorland 
spread beneath the windows of the Bronte sisters, 
for everywhere there is heard the plaintive wail of 
the desolation that broods above the marshes ; while 
we shall find that the trees of Rydal Mount have 
dropped their leaves upon Wordsworth's songs. The 



192 IVAYSIDE AhID FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Grub Street attics have photographed their poverty in 
the writings of their occupants ; and as De Quincey's 
early hunger shaped the moods of his later life, so 
the physical environments of the student, artist, or 
author give color and flavor to their created works. 

It is curious, too, that in the writings of men there 
are so few allusions to the places where they have 
wrought. Poets have written of the brooks by which 
they paused, the woods in which they wandered, and 
have not been slow to pay tribute to the outward 
surroundings that have ministered to them. Still, 
how few of them have drawn for us the picture of the 
rooms in which they did their work ! The landscape 
has left its features in their songs ; but seldom have 
they told of the shelves upon the walls, the dusty 
folios, the famihar table, the writer's chair, the narrow 
spaces, in which, with ''gentle pacings," the immortal 
work has been evolved. Leigh Hunt saw Lamb in 
his study take down and kiss the old folio ; yet this 
genial writer, who has said the sweetest things in 
literature of books and their places, has told us little 
of the spot where he created the sunniest essays ever 
written, and only by imagination can we see the 
room where he found the joy of living, and where on 
some day he hoped to lay his over-beating temples 
on a book and have the death he envied. 

His study must have been a tiny place, for he 
used to say that he liked contact with his books. He 



THE STUDENTS IVORKSHOP. 1 93 

loved to touch them, to have a table high piled with 
books behind him, a writing-desk beside a warm fire 
at his feet, having them all close by, so that if the 
wind came in he could fence it off by his precious 
books. The Archbishop of Toledo wrote his homi- 
lies in a room ninety feet long. The Marquis Mari- 
aloa must have been approached by Gil Bias through 
whole ranks of glittering authors, standing at due 
distance. Montaigne had in his great chateau a 
study, " sixteen paces in diameter, with three noble 
and free prospects." Epictetus preferred a Httle spot, 
large enough only for a stool and chair ; while Milton 
believed in the hospitality of knowledge, and wrote : 

" And let my lamp at midnight hour 
Be seen in some high lonely tower." 

The genuine student's ideal study is of double 
character. There is the library with its long rows 
of masters, the rare editions in every department of 
art and knowledge, — the choice Aldines, Bodonis, 
Elzevirs; and beyond this is the working "den," — a 
closet-like room with rude chair and table only, with 
nothing on the narrow walls, windowless, save for 
the light that comes from the panes set high in wall 
or roof. Here, with no distraction, the mind and 
pen can work together, the silent counsellors in serried 
ranks in the room beyond, guarding against intrusion 
and sending in the invisible influence of their mighty 
13 



194 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

yet speechless presence. The rain beats noisily upon 
the roof and walls of the little den ; the floor is littered 
deep, for no profane eye sees this inner sanctuary ; 
it is a place of dreams, a mount of visions, entered 
only when the mind is girded for its work and would 
fight its battles in solitude. In the midst of the 
White Mountains there is a place like this, where a 
working author to whom the summer brought only 
partial rest performed his daily task. It was in the 
attic of a summer hotel, in an unplastered room ; a 
rude box was his chair, a board his table ; no curtain 
was at the window, no carpet upon the floor, nothing 
of comfort or ease. But here by the open window 
the gifted one would sit enraptured by his thought, 
and the purple clouds would shed their glory on his 
page, and the story of the laughing skies, the annals 
of the eternal hills, would come and bid him be their 
interpreter to a waiting world. 

On the New England coast there is the study of a 
genial writer of tales. From the driftwood of the 
shore he has fashioned a Httle hut just above the 
waves. The broken spars that form the walls are 
rudely covered with boards between which is the fibrous 
turf matted thick with wild sea-grasses ; the roof is 
covered with refuse tin which the roofers of the village 
have discarded ; and beside the walls, with clumsy 
masonry, a chimney has been built like the wide-rooted 
ones that the Normans used to make. The house is 



THE STUDENTS IVORKSHOP. 195 

tiny in its inner proportions, with a floor of native 
earth trodden hard into such uneven surface as is 
beneath the fair mosaics of St. Mark's at Venice. 
There is a rude table of unpainted wood, and by it a 
chair platted with crude handicraft of native rushes ; 
and beside the sooty fireplace is a rocker of such en- 
ticing curvature of back as makes it the fit place for 
dreaming dreams beside the fire. 

In a New England town there is a study that realizes 
one's ideal of the environments of a contented liter- 
ary life. Outside a thriving town, hardly ten minutes 
walk from the centre of its little life, a pleasant home 
lies half hidden behind its hedges. It has green 
blinds after the New England fashion, and sits in the 
midst of a great yard walled round with currant and 
other bushes. There is everywhere an atmosphere of 
comfort, for the great farms are just beyond, with 
hospitable sheds, painted red without, and clean 
with newest whitewash within. The grass is green 
with the peculiar lustrous hue of English turf, always 
short, as though the cattle were allowed at times to 
feed upon it and sweeten it with their breath. In 
the midst of the yard a miniature house is set, white- 
walled, green-blinded, just beyond the outmost spread 
of the maples, where it can catch all the light 
and sunniness. This is the study of the proprietor 
of this home with its rich acres beyond. The books 
gathered in a life of semi-leisure are upon the shelves ; 



196 1VAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the open fireplace is in the walls ; rugs made from 
the skins of beasts shot in earlier days are upon the 
floor ; and all the trophies of the years — the oars and 
foils of college days, the fishing-rods of the days of 
sport — are gathered here in this pleasant place. 
From the windows every part of the estate can 
be seen ; and at the door, just where, from the old 
step, the saddle can be mounted, is the hitching-post, 
where the convenient horse stands waiting to bear 
the owner to the supervision of the fields, and then 
back again to the accustomed chair. This, to the 
average student, would be the ideal life, town and 
country touching each, — a life of study mingling 
with one of easy yet successful manual toil. 

There are not a few studies created by great wealth. 
In Germantown, just outside of Philadelphia, a well- 
known banker has erected probably one of the finest 
libraries in the United States. The building adjoins his 
house, which is one of the princely dwellings of the 
city and furnished with all the elegance that cultivated 
taste and unlimited wealth can devise. The library 
is lighted mostly from the roof, though there is one 
large window opening toward the finest view upon 
the estate. The walls are tinted with neutral colors, 
though on the ceiling there are chaste decorations 
such as befit a place of books. Carved oaken cases 
extend around the walls, and on them are all the 
great masters of the realm of literature. Wealth has 



THE STUDENT'S IVORKSHOP. l()7 

imposed no limits upon desire ; and here are the 
masterpieces of the ages, set in such royal bindings 
as bewilder and delight. Upon shelves and brackets, 
walls and mantels, there are a student's costly instru- 
ments, a telescope for the infinitely great, micro- 
scopes for the infinitely small, globes, charts, maps, 
costly vases disinterred from buried cities, ornaments 
of Etruscan art, trophies rescued from Homeric lands. 
The poor student, who has been wont to exult in 
his costly treasures, returns home with a sense of 
infidelity, because in the presence of fairer treasures 
he has been momentarily unfaithful ; and never again 
is there quite the old pride in the presence of the 
little hoards which have so sorely taxed his scanty 
purse. 

There are two things at least that are essential in 
the equipment of the well-furnished study. The first 
is the open fire. The study must of necessity be free 
from all human occupants save its owner, and yet 
there is need of some sense of hfe. Scott found it in 
his dogs ; others have had their pets of various kinds. 
The open fire seems to give the subtile companionship 
that is needed. Whether it is because there is motion, 
transformation, an apparent process of life, I am not 
philosopher enough to say ; but fire has always been 
among men a deity of worship, and in the lowest and 
highest civilization has been regarded not simply as an 
instrument of service, but as having a sort of sympathy 



198 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

with men. There is nothing in the range of lighter 
essayists more quaintly human than the fireside rev- 
eries of Marvel. There is little of virile philosophy in 
these imaginings, and one does not well to take these 
reveries when he would gird himself for life's great 
work. But for its meditative hours, when the spirit 
loves to deal in retrospections, there is no friend who 
can with subtler sympathy enter into the mood of the 
spirit, and bring back the pleasant visions of forgotten 
days better, than the fire within the grate. 

In addition to the library fire there ought to be 
somewhere in the dustiest corner a solemn, large- eyed 
owl, — the only creature ever made by Mother Nature 
as the embodiment of wisdom, and therefore fitted to 
be the hterary deity of the student's study. 

There are dark horses in literature as in politics, 
and there are those who have the gift of silence. 
This is the owl's strong point. He is not loquacious ; 
he is as silent as the tombs of the Capulets. His 
plumage does not excite envy; his flesh has the 
reputation of being as tough as a publisher's con- 
science ; but he looks as wise as a mathematical pro- 
fessor. In the British Museum there is a large case 
of owls ; and one may travel from the Blarney Stone 
to the Hanlin Yuan of China without finding such an 
assemblage of wisdom as glares from the glass eyes of 
these feathered philosophers. 

Beyond, however, all outward furnishing, to the 



THE STUDENTS IVORKSHOP. 1 99 

genuine student every place is ideal in its beauty 
where rest his beloved books. Hawthorne could trans- 
form into a palace an old country inn with no other 
wand than an old directory ; while Lord Strangford 
made his hour's delay at the railway station a delight 
by tracing out the etymology of the names in Brad- 
shaw's Guide. Housed in hovels or in palaces, the 
student's library is his place of joy, and once among 
his beloved books, he can say with Machiavelli : " I 
pass into the antique courts of ancient men, where, 
welcomed lovingly by them, I feed upon the food 
which is my own, and for which I was born. Here 
I can speak with them without show, and can ask 
them the motives of their actions, and they respond to 
me by virtue of their humanity. For hours together 
the miseries of life no longer annoy me ; I forget 
every vexation ; I do not fear poverty ; and death it- 
self doth not dismay me, for I have altogether trans- 
ferred myself to those with whom I hold converse." 



THE PARSON'S SMALL BOY. 

THERE is a German proverb which declares that 
one can never be too careful in the choice of 
his parents ; and if I had my life to live over again, I 
should at least hesitate before allowing myself to be 
born into the world as a minister's son. 

To begin with, he is born with a bad name, the 
old saying about ministers' sons and deacons' daugh- 
ters creating an atmosphere of suspicion around the 
cradle in which rocks the male heir of a parson's 
family. From observation of the world, I am satis- 
fied that the old saying has suffered in translation, and 
that the original manuscript gives the bad name to 
the ministers' daughters and the deacons' sons, — a 
conclusion that has received the commendation of 
not a few of the masculine scions of the clergy. 

Then this being born as a kind of ecclesiastical 
baby is not pleasant. There is an excess of attention 
from which a timid child naturally shrinks ; while the 
sense of proprietorship on the part of all the parish 
matrons, bringing the consciousness of being a sort 
of church baby, is confusing to the infantile mind. 



THE PARSON'S SMALL BOY. 20I 

Other babies are permitted to enjoy the usual childish 
ailments in comparative peace ; but every amateur 
nurse in the parish feels free to try her nostrums on 
the public baby. I shall not permit myself to be 
ungracious to the super-serviceable old ladies who 
lent a hand in the measles crisis, nor add an extra 
pang to the avenging consciences of the old maids 
who added new horrors to the chicken-pox catas- 
trophe. I can feel the tightening of their bandages 
even now, and, to my mind at least, the fabulous 
depravity of a parson's boy is simply a feeble attempt 
to pay back to the world some of the sorrows it has 
caused him to suffer in earher years. 

Reasoning, however, from the old axiom that the 
most amiable persons are evolved from the crossest 
babies, I am reasonably assured that the lives of my 
earlier tormentors did not consist of bliss wholly 
unalloyed, — a fact that has received the verbal con- 
firmation of the guardians of my youth. 

I shall pass over in forgiving silence the catalogue 
of the sufferings inflicted by my multitudinous nurses, 
having, I trust, a more forgiving though not less 
observant mind than the poet who wrote the follow- 
ing lines : — 

" I recollect a nurse called Ann, 
Who carried me about the grass. 
And one fine day a fine young man 
Came up and kissed the pretty lass. 
She did not make the least objection. 



202 JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

Thinks I, ' Aha ! 

When I can talk I '11 tell mamma.' 

And that 's my earliest recollection." 

Emerging from the cradle-stage, I passed into the 
errand-running period, inevitably present in the 
career of a minister's son. My legs were in perpet- 
ual motion in the church's interest. If a levee was 
in progress, who so naturally as the minister's son 
should run for the key of hall or vestry, build the 
fires, and carry the notices ? If the church was to be 
decorated at Christmas, the parson's boy must pull 
the evergreens ; at the " Old Folks' Concert," he 
must carry the dishes and borrow the settees ; and 
if I should outlive Methuselah, I could never eat half 
as much ice-cream as at church festivals I have 
frozen, though it is said that I am not without some 
talent with the spoon and saucer. Then the chorister 
must be supplied with weekly hymns, the sexton noti- 
fied, sewing-circles generally waited on ; and while I 
never resented the preparations for the fairs, I used 
to bewail the lonesomeness of sweeping up the hall 
and carrying home the properties after the festivities. 

The minister of thirty years ago in the Massachu- 
setts towns was generally on the school comm.ittee ; 
and for the sake of lightening the labors of our teach- 
ers, they were told that if we had need of punishment 
we should be sent home, where the ceremony would 
be performed with thoroughness and despatch. We 



THE PARSON'S SMALL BOY. 203 

could never quite see why, when the teacher was paid 
for this sort of thing, the minister's sons should be 
neglected, though perhaps our own aesthetic sense, 
which preferred a light rod in the school-room to a 
heavy one in the domestic woodshed, had something 
to do with our discontent. It was very annoying to 
a youth intent on learning to have his studies broken 
in upon by being sent home with notes asking the 
favor that the bearer be flogged and returned ; and if 
there are occasional gaps in my knowledge of the 
occult sciences taught in my boyhood, it is perhaps 
owing to the above-mentioned absences^ which it is 
due to myself to say were not of my own seeking. I 
knew, however, that this arrangement was largely an 
official one, intended for effect on the other boys, 
and therefore seldom went back for a duplicate, if in 
the transit from the schoolhouse to the woodshed the 
original note was lost. 

A quarter of a century ago was the golden age in 
New England of denominational associations. At 
such times, the minister's small boy became general 
martyr to the church at large. By day, he was the 
pilot of the delegates to their houses of entertainment, 
and the burden-bearer of the noon collation ; while 
at night, after his own bed was monopolized by the 
brethren, he could take his choice of such portions of 
the floor as were not occupied by other members of 
the family. 



204 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

As I remember the days of my youth, our church 
had an itinerant ministry, and our house must have 
been on the general hne of travel. Mr. Beecher com- 
plained that his church was nothing but a spiritual 
hotel ; our house in the old days was a clerical tavern, 
and never without a good business. I was as glad to 
see the brethren as the hospitable parents ; but to say 
that I enjoyed doing their errands, sleeping on the 
floor, and eating at the second table on their account, 
is to exaggerate the feelings I entertained in those 
days. 

Ministers' sons who were so short-sighted as to be 
born a generation ago did not always look forward to 
the Sabbath with enthusiasm. If the few who have 
survived the perils of their early lives could speak, 
they would say that they were surfeited with meetings. 
The weekly lesson must be drilled into us at the 
home end of the line, and drilled out of us at the 
Sunday-school end of it. The innocent amusements 
that enlivened the exercises for the other boys we 
could enjoy only by stealth, by reason of the liabihty 
of being called to account for it then and there by 
the paternal pastor on the platform. 

Then the preaching services meant more for the 
parson's sons than for the other boys, for while the 
average boy could solace himself with his library book 
during the closing exhortations, such arrangements 
were not permitted to the clerical scions. When I 



THE PARSON'S SMALL BOY. 205 

used to read in those old slavery days of the horrors 
of the middle passage, I imagined they were some- 
thing like the horrors of the front pew. This seat 
was always reserved in New England for the minister's 
family ; or, to be more accurate, the minister's family 
was reserved for it. It was purely a New England 
device, and I have always laid it up against the Pil- 
grims. No one would hire the pew; and if all else 
forgot, the preacher's family should remember that 
life was a vale of tears. The front pew would do the 
business. Looking back upon it, I still consider that 
as a seat for boys, it is the best evidence of " man's 
inhumanity to man." There is no place for the 
growing feet of a growing boy ; there is no scenery 
but the minister and the pulpit; all the other boys 
are behind ; if the minister wishes a glass of water, 
the front-pew boy is the one that the beckoning finger 
lights on first. Then the angle of vision is severely 
acute ; the head must be thrown back if one would be 
diligent to see how many more pages before the 
amen ; the neck aches severely, although as the 
minister's son is supposed to be ultimately hanged 
anyway, a little preliminary neck-stretching cannot 
much matter. 

I was more than fortunate in the indulgence of my 
parents, and the ills I suffered were incident to my 
accidental birth as a minister's son. I used to suffer 
in the matter of clothes ; not that I did not have 



206 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

enough, — the trouble was I had too many. It hap- 
pened in this wise. On Mondays the preachers met 
in Boston. The ready-made clothes movement was 
just starting, and Oak Hall led the craze. Here, on 
their way to the cars, the preachers would stop after 
taking their theology at Cornhill. Now, one cannot 
always carry a parson's boy in his eye ; and with the 
uncertainty of all guessing, and the natural parental 
inclination to allow for growth, my Oak Hall clothes 
seldom used to fit me till the patches began to come, 
— there being such a general bagginess about the 
trousers that I found myself in the condition of the 
other boy who could seldom tell whether he was 
going to school or coming home. 

It was a good thing for the poor, but not so for- 
tunate for me, that my father was a preacher of 
practical charity. When we moved out of the then 
narrow, ready-made clothing zone, I was the invol- 
untary victim of impoverished tailors, who were 
employed by the kind-hearted minister because no 
one else would give them work. I don't think that 
even in the last threadbare stages, the clothes ever 
got rid of the smell of the tobacco and gin which 
solaced their creators ; and though I was not naturally 
an uncomely youth, it would be distorting history to 
say that I was " the glass of fashion and the mould of 
form." 

I am not undergoing an examination for ordination, 




V 

i 




%-" 



THE PARSON'S SMALL BOY. 209 

and therefore may seem to be going out of my way 
in saying that I was called to the pulpit when only 
eight years of age. It came about in this way. I 
was sitting in one of the side seats with a neighbor's 
boy. We were negotiating a transfer of knives, and 
were a little at loggerheads as to the amount of 
"boot." I have no doubt we were somewhat ani- 
mated, for we both had a turn for business ; at any 
rate, the preacher suddenly stopped, called my name, 
and did not exactly invite me into the pulpit, but 
said in a kind of peremptory manner that I would 
come up at once. 

Of course there was no reason why the other boy 
should not have come too ; if he had, I should not 
have cared, for we could have finished the trade. 
But no, he was not a minister's son, and could swap 
knives with the whole congregation with impunity. 
Eighteen years after that, I went into the same pulpit 
and preached ; but all through the service I could 
not help wondering where the other boy was, and 
what became of the knife I lost. 

On the whole, then, the minister's son has some 
trials in fairly getting launched into the world. He 
has, on the other hand, very many peculiar blessings, 
which perhaps may excuse us from any great expendi- 
ture of sympathy for him. While taught by precept 
and example the ways of peace, he does not as a rule 
bear so heavily the responsibility of his father's office 
14 



2IO WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

that he will not take a hand in his own defence if the 
impositions crowd unpleasantly; and as a rule, we 
think his good conduct is at least as good as the run 
of boys. The youngsters of whom we have written 
were the boys of thirty years ago, and are now jog- 
ging along into middle life. Very many of them, 
despite the hardships of their youth, have taken up 
their father's profession, which proves that manhood 
forgets boyhood's trials, and that the old theory that 
one avoids the fire that burned him, is not always 
true. 



AN ALASKAN VOYAGE. 

THE voyage to Alaska is without a parallel in 
grandeur and variety of scenery. From Van- 
couver to Sitka, the course is through land-locked 
channels from one half a mile to three miles in 
width. Great mountains are on each side, many of 
them snow-covered ; and from the channel, bays 
extend far into the land lined with pleasant shores. 
The mountains are forest-covered, the trees coming 
down to the water's edge. 

There are few villages and no signs of life, except 
here and there a tiny fishing settlement, or the soli- 
tary canoe of some Indian fisherman. Wonderful 
fiords appear as the voyage lengthens ; waterfalls 
drop their ribbon-like streams down the face of the 
mountains ; delicious shadows lurk in the bays ; moun- 
tains nine thousand feet high sentinel the way, while 
behind them, set against the sky, are great snow 
peaks. Only twice in the long voyage is the river- 
like passage open to the sea, and then only for a little 
distance. At times the Hudson River is suggested, 
occasionally the Rhine, often the Thousand Islands, 



212 IVAYSIDF. AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

very often the Danube at the place of its greatest 
glory, the Iron Gates. Farther north the round hills 
are like the Highlands of Scotland ; in the northern 
latitudes for a little while, the islands are bleak, wind- 
swept, vegetationless like the Hebrides ; but for all the 
distance, the scenery is incomparable in the beauty 
of quiet waters, the symmetry of hills and mountains, 
the serenity of sunUt bays, loveliness of inlet, sound, 
and river reaches, while the seaweed fringes the 
cleanest shores ; and beyond, against the clouds, great 
Alpine peaks catch and hold the sunshine. 

Alaska is nine times the size of New England, and 
as large as Great Britain, Prussia, Spain, and Italy. 
The western island of the Aleutian chain is only 
thirty-nine miles from Asia ; and taking this as the 
western outpost of the United States, and Eastport 
as the eastern boundary, San Francisco is six hun- 
dred miles east of the centre of our country. Alaska 
is neither a State nor Territory; it is a reservation, 
like the District of Columbia, and is governed by the 
laws of Oregon. It has a population of thirty-one 
thousand, twenty- four thousand of whom are Indians. 
These Indians are a peculiar type, — Tsimpsians, 
Haidas, and Tlinkits. They have a common lan- 
guage called Chinook, a kind of patois devised by 
the Hudson Bay Company for commercial uses. Its 
vocabulary does not consist of more than three hun- 
dred words, although with its mnemonic qualities it 



AN ALASKAN VOYAGE. 



213 



is capable of a wide range of expression. The lan- 
guage has no literature nor grammar, and is inter- 
mixed with the dialects of the different tribes. The 
natives are unattractive, small in stature, in the north 
weak-limbed from life in their canoes, faces broad 
and expressionless, — a coarser type of the Japanese, 
without any of the lithe, 
sinewy movement that be- ^ 
longs to the Eastern tribes. 
Previous to the coming of 
the missionaries they were 
very degraded. Even now 
their manner of living is 
barbaric. Their homes are 
huts, and their meals are 
eaten from the floor. 

The vegetation of Alaska 
is luxuriant. Sitka is fif- 
teen degrees north of Port- 
land, and though the Alas- 
kan voyage takes one as 
far north as the latitude of 

Greenland, yet the isothermal line is that of the Dis- 
trict of Columbia or Devonshire, England. Only four 
times in thirty-six years has the thermometer reached 
zero. A warm Japan current, called the kurosiwo, 
touches the coast, and makes a luxuriant vegetation. 
The ferns are almost man-high, and the tangles suggest 






214 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

those which Stanley found in the heart of the dark 
continent. There is great moisture, and the heavy 
precipitation gives the mountains their shining crowns, 
feeds the glaciers, forces vegetations, brings every 
leaf and twig to its fullest perfection, and keeps 
the foliage so fresh and dewy that at times the green 
almost dazzles with its intensity. Day after day the 
voyage goes on, through great river-like reaches, by 
majestic scenery, shimmering waters, gleaming cas- 
cades, rounded islands. There are glimpses of 
sounds opening into other sounds, waterfalls trailing 
their feathery mists over the face of cliffs, mighty 
bastion-like mountains glistening with the waters of 
melting snows or scarred with the trail of old 
avalanches. 

Not until the borders of Alaska are reached, is 
there any town of fair population. Fort Simpson is 
almost on the boundary line. It is a northern Nan- 
tucket in the quaint beauty of its situation. The water 
is as clear as crystal ; the tawny rocks and ledges are 
shell-covered, hung with draperies of seaweed ; tiny 
roads skirt the village ; there are curious totems carved 
with every fantastic figure, and the village is thrifty 
and attractive. Fort Wrangel, Sitka, and Junneau are 
the principal towns of Alaska. The first is a decayed 
village, which lost its business when the mines in its 
vicinity were abandoned. Junneau is the largest 
town, and aspires to be a city. Sitka, the capital, is 



AN ALASKAN l/OYAGE. 21$ 

quaint in its architecture, with many memorials of the 
old days of Russian occupancy. It is beautiful for 
situation, has an imposing Greek church, the govern- 
ment buildings, and naval vessels in its harbor. 
There are remnants yet of the showy court that was 
once here, and not a few traditions of the gay life of 
Russian belles and officers who played here their 
little dramas of love and pleasure. The culmination 
of Alaskan scenery is at Muir Glacier. At the ter- 
minus of Glacier Bay, it lifts up its wall of ice three 
hundred feet. It is a mile wide, and with its lateral 
branches covers an area of three hundred and fifty 
miles. The vast moraines are deserts of desolation, 
while the sun changes into marvels of form and color 
the pinnacles and bastions of this great frozen wall. 
Travellers who have belted the world describe it as 
one of the earth's wonders ; and a noted scientist says 
that in all his experience he recalls but two instances 
which affected him so powerfully as his visit here, — 
a sunrise on the Himalayan range and the view of 
the midnight sun from the North Cape. Everywhere 
on the Alaskan voyage one is impressed with the 
vastness with which Nature has done her work. Many 
of the islands are as large as States. Nameless moun- 
tains have Alpine heights ; glaciers which would excite 
wonder elsewhere are as yet unchristened ; bays in 
which great ships could ride are unexplored, and 
inlets fair as a vision have no habitation. For hours 



2l6 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

the voyager passes through channels which excel the 
Rhine in beauty ; through bays which in the blueness 
of their waters, the glory of their mountains, the 
intensity of their colors, suggest the Bay of Naples ; 
and yet he must look upon the captain's chart to find 
the name of the wonder places. 

The voyage is long, but the sight of Mount Fair- 
weather would compensate one for the journey were 
there no other attractions along the way. It is sharply 
defined against the sky, shapely, massive, and yet 
deUcately lined and superbly draperied with snow. 
Other mountains obtrude their black anatomies and 
crease the ermine mantle which covers them ; but this 
queen of mountains shows no rent nor crease in the 
splendid robes she wears. 

The sky is blue above and beyond, and the sunlight 
illumines the snow and changes it into something 
ethereal. Every moment the vision changes, but only 
to take on new grace. The clouds seem to be at- 
tendant courtiers, and the sky the background for the 
spectacle ; while the mountain with gentle coquetries, 
as if conscious of her beauty, changes form and hue, 
attitude and pose, as if she knows that she is holding 
hearts and eyes captive with her witcheries. The 
mountain does not overawe with mere bulkiness ; it 
does not appall with its magnificent height, although 
it can look down upon Mont Blanc ; it fascinates by 
the grace of its proportions, and woos by the gentle 



AN ALASKAN VOYAGE. 217 

ministries of its almost human graces. The great 
glaciers awe one by revealing human weakness : they 
appall with the sense of resistless power, and awe by 
the vast mysteries of force and time ; but it is only 
the terror of fear that is awakened, and one comes 
away from them with stilled hearts, as if seeing the 
workings of resistless fate. But this mountain gives 
a sense of comradeship. Its messages are tidings of 
beneficence. It feeds the streams which run among 
the hills ; it holds the clouds captive, and changes 
them to miracles of mercy, and marries strength and 
beauty in the strength of the hills and the grace of 
its sunlit snows. The voyager, when the journey is 
over, has memories of great ranges snow-covered, 
islands that were like emeralds set in azure, channels 
that were rivers, bays that were like lakes, great 
glaciers which held wonder dumb, and sunlit peaks 
which gave to speech the language of rapture. But, 
queen and monarch of them all, abides the royal peak 
of Fairweather draperied with the snow and jewelled 
with the sun. What the cathedral of Milan is in one's 
memories of Europe, peerless and unrivalled, that is 
Fairweather among the deathless remembrances of 
an Alaskan voyage. 

The unique feature of Alaska is the totem. The 
totems are great trunks of trees or poles carved 
into the grotesque images of animals, fishes, birds, 
and all monstrosities. They are not religious sym- 



2l8 



IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



bols, but are the coats-of-arms of families, heraldic 
devices, the art the rudest, but giving in symbol lan- 
guage the traditions of their race. The tribes trace 
their origin to the animals or birds that surmount these 







totem poles, — the raven, bear, whale, or seal. There 
is a folk-lore which runs through all the northern 
tribes. A raven was their ancestor. He made a 
man and locked him in a kind of Pandora's box ; but 
he escaped and made the moon, and the moon made 
all the peoples, and they made all the troubles of the 
world. In the old days these totems were the 
heraldic signs of great chiefs, raised with curious 



AN ALASKAN VOYAGE. 219 

ceremonies, the memorials of traditions the very 
memory of which has now passed away. How 
strangely life preserves its past, and how every people 
tries, in its own rude fashion, to make the symbols of 
its dreams and visions ! Greece writes them in her 
Homeric songs. Rome carves the figure of the wolf 
that suckled the fabled founders of the city. The 
Northmen still sing the sagas of their Viking kings ; 
while that deep instinct of humanity which makes 
wiser people keep their traditions, bids this ruder 
people keep the memorials of their fabled past, and 
so, following the world, — 

" They painted on the grave-posts 
On the graves yet unforgotten, 
Each his own ancestral totem, 
Each the symbol of his household, 
Figures of the bear and reindeer, 
Of the turtle, crane, and beaver." 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 

I HAVE never been reconciled to the Christmas 
Tree. It is very beautiful, with the brilliant 
lights flashing against the dark aromatic branches, 
and there is something in its fragrant greenness that 
makes it a fit symbol of the Christmas festival ; but 
when its branches bear our gifts it is a usurper, and 
not a friend. It was made to be a thing of beauty, 
not a beast of burden ; its fruit is fragrance and 
greenness, telling us that as its beauty exists in the 
midst of winter's desolation, so Christmas Day stands 
green and fragrant amid the sorrows and woes of a 
wintry life. We cannot tie the fruits on alien trees, 
nor can we with our strings and pins make our 
Christmas Trees easily bear other fruit than that which 
they distil from their inner juices. 

I do not wish, with any little pessimisms, to dim a 
single light that glows amid the Christmas branches ; 
but to accept without protest the Christmas Tree as 
the messenger of our gifts is to be disloyal to the old 
Stocking at the Chimney, — which is one of the bright- 
est memories of childhood ; and as life lengthens, the 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 221 

mind becomes tenacious of its memories, and does 
not easily see the old loves and associations displaced 
by new customs. 

Why, the very stocking that we used to hang, had 
meaning. Night after night the patient mother 
fingers had knit the stitches by the fireside or the 
evening lamp ; we had held the tangled skein out of 
which, with loving patience, it had come ; and the 
foot that wore it could feel the very warmth of the 
mother heart and the tender caressings of the mother 
hand that had made it. There is a finer grace and 
larger beauty in the "hose" we buy, — a smoother 
finish, woven of finer threads ; but somehow our fine 
machines lack the mother touch that thrilled from the 
fingers into the old knitting-needles, and deposited in 
their weavings the sympathy and love of motherhood. 
No, the machines of our inventors never can make 
such fabrics for our wearing as the tired hands of 
our patient mothers made, so long ago. 

Then the hanging of them by the chimney-side ! 
Why, for days and weeks we had chosen the very spot 
where they should hang, with their open mouths set 
against the chimney, lest, after all, it might be true 
that the good saint who loved the children did come 
down the sooty way, and might in all the calls he 
had to make before the morning somehow overlook 
us, unless we made easy way for the presentation of 
his gifts. 



222 



JVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 



Some of us never have regretted much that we were 
born so late, except when we have seen in some old 
houses the fireplaces of the long ago, and have heard 
the old folks tell of the good cheer that used to blos- 




som at the open fire. There is a dreaming spirit that 
would have revelled in the lights and shadows of the 
old hearths ; that would have seen a thousand pic- 
tures in the dancing flames, and have found congenial 
friendships in the spirits of the woods set free by the 
emancipating flames. We have the open hearth with 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 223 

our modern homes. It has not ampUtudes of hospi- 
table space, nor is it dark with great sooty background 
painted by a thousand fires ; but it is a hearth on 
which the ashes fall as gray and soft as ever ashes 
fell ; the brasses that hold the wood reflect our faces ; 
the smoke goes up in fleecy plumes ; in the flames 
we can see the pictures ; and before the fire we can 
sit and dream, and build our castles, — not so high 
nor vast as once we reared them, but still grand and 
beautiful ; and in the background, behind the smoke 
and flame where the field of vision is, even now we 
can see the white sails of our ships sailing homeward 
to this very hearth, bringing from far Cathay the very 
treasures for which we have been waiting, oh, so 
long ! But it is not the old hearth where the crane 
hung, around which gathered the domestic and the 
social divinities, every brick saturated with the good 
cheer of a thousand feasts, by whose fire the food of 
generations had been prepared ; by whose flame chil- 
dren had studied their lessons, and age had entertained 
its memories. 

We believe, of course, that the world is getting 
better ; that " the thoughts of men are widened with 
the process of the suns ; " that " Time's noblest ofl"- 
spring is its last ; " that we are in " the foremost files 
of time ; " that ^' the old order changeth ever for the 
new;" and all that sort of thing. But it is useless 
for any one to tell us, especially while we are in this 



224 WAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

reminiscent mood, that the world can be quite so 
good and noble beside a base-burner as beside the 
open fire upon the hearth. We would not at any 
other time confess how great pagans we yet are, 
although we have always lived among fairly Christian 
people ; but the old mythologies are not converted 
out of us. We know that there are spirits in the 
woods, for we have often heard the rustling of their 
wings ; there are nymphs that haunt the streams, for 
we have seen their footprints ; and there are fire- 
side spirits that haunt the flames, and come down our 
chimneys and look at us, and then bear away the 
messages of those that trust them. We should all be 
sorry to have these gentle divinities go out of our 
life. But just think of our entertaining them at an air- 
tight stove ; think of holding converse with the invisible 
spirits of the air beside a steam radiator, or sending 
one's dreams through the meshes of a japanned regis- 
ter. One wishes, when the winter night is on, and 
the snow blows, and the house is still, to dream 
awhile, to let fancy paint its pictures, imagination 
rear its castles, memory call up the touch of vanished 
hands and the music that has died to silence in our 
dumb hearts. Out of the ashes of the open fire come 
the shadows of the past ; in the flames the dreams 
are pictured every one ; and we know, what we have 
long guessed, that dreamland is as real as earth itself. 
But think of holding our communion by a nickel- 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 225 

plated stove, whose flames are sullen because the 
ashes clog the grate ; whose odors are very gassy 
unless the damper has right adjustment ; or worse 
than this, if one would meditate, he takes his chair 
and draws up to a hole within the wall, being obliged 
before he can even feel the radiance of heat to go 
into his cellar and rake the clinkers out, and set the 
automatic damper, — to turn on the dreams, as it were, 
by filling up the boilers and letting out the cold air 
from the pipes. No, Count Rumford meant well, of 
course ; but when he invented stoves, he put off the 
coming of the kingdom, and made it harder to 
christianize the world. 

Of course I am often asked if I believe in Santa 
Claus. Well, I am not telling all my heresies or 
superstitions, and will wait until some larger heretics 
are settled with before I go into the confessional ; I 
will only give one fact from my own experience, and 
leave it to the sceptics to explain. There used to 
live within my home a tiny girl. She has long since 
exchanged herself for another and larger one, not so 
large as she hoped to be, but twice as big as we wish 
she were. Well, before a certain Christmas Day 
that came when she was small, and we were young, 
she made a list of all the things she wished. Through 
all the autumn she worked upon it, correcting and 
revising, the process, however, consisting always in 
additions rather than elisions ; and when the list 
IS 



226 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

was finished every item bore the prophecy of bank- 
ruptcy to us. She naively asked us, as we scanned 
the schedules, if we thought that Santa Claus would 
rise to the occasion. She half believed the heresy 
that the only Santa Claus there is, lives at the lower 
end of the chimney, but she was not sure. She knew 
that he was either at the top or bottom of it ; and 
she thought that between us both we somehow could 
arrange it. Well, we told her to write her orders out 
in good clear hand, such as an old gentleman in the 
dark could read ; to put it within an envelope, direct it 
to Santa Claus, put it up a chimney some days before, 
then hang her stocking near by, go to bed on Christ- 
mas Eve, and wait results. And she did it just that 
way, sending supplementary messages from time to 
time by the same post, with special instructions as to 
the things that should not be omitted if the order was 
to suffer any amendment. Well, on Christmas Eve 
the register was taken out, and the letters were gone, 
showing that Santa Claus must have received them ; 
and on Christmas morning there she found in the 
very spot and in the very manner of her instructions 
to Santa Claus the very things for which she had asked. 
If this does not prove that there is a Santa Claus, 
why, we should like to know just what kind of proof 
would satisfy the unbelievers. 

It is all very well, this having the Christmas Tree 
in the afternoon or evening, with well-mannered 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 22/ 

children, dressed in flounces and '' patent leathers," 
sitting decorously on fine-spun carpets with the 
caterer's pans and cans in the kitchen for the Christ- 
mas feast, and kind-hearted parents, who have been 
coaxed and bullied into buying presents, sitting by, 
every child knowing that the boxes on the trees con- 
tain the very things that he has personally selected, 
and if not, he must know the reason why, and every 
parent knowing that if there is one thing omitted, 
explanations will be in order. Oh, this Christmas 
business in evening dress, with hired orchestra and 
refreshment a la mode, is dreadfully " swell," as the 
saying is ; but it is a great bore, and a fearful fraud 
upon both children and parents. 

Why, the planning and the surprising, the whispered 
consultations, the wondering curiosity, the feverish 
anxiety, the expectations and the fears, are half the 
joy of Christmas. The smuggling into the house of 
clandestine goods, the hidings in drawers and closets 
and attics, the little fictions of hard times and lean 
purses, the simulated indifference to appeals and 
suggestions and hints that are more than hints, the 
refusing face and the assenting heart, the little 
denials and the large sacrifices, the repetition of the 
old miracle of how the cruse of oil shall be used and 
not spent, — there is nothing in life comparable to 
the sweet delights of these miseries. Why, we have 
seen mothers tired unto death with plottings and 



228 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

plannings for their children, and yet in the weariness 
there was the very ecstasy of love. We have seen 
parents robbing themselves of the necessaries of life, 
and feehng paid by the smile of the children's faces 
as they received the luxuries which were purchased 
at such costly sacrifice. And then the deliciousness 
of seeing the stockings filled ; the wrappings and 
hidings ; the loading of the precious freight into the 
argosies of love ; the fitful and uneasy slumber of 
parents and children, whose couches are made sleep- 
less by the angels of love and expectation that watch 
beside them ; the faint glimmer of the morn ; the 
timid cry out of the darkness, "Can I come?" the 
half-hearted pleading to wait a while that the children 
may have yet longer the luxury of anticipation and 
that the parents may enjoy the sweet comfort of 
love's sacrifices. And then when moments that have 
seemed like hours pass, and the pleading petition is 
repeated and assent is given, how like the springing of 
the torrent when the frost is broken, comes the pat- 
tering of children's feet, — a music sweeter than all 
the Christmas carols ever sung. The wonderment of 
it ; the ecstasy of accomplished wishes ; the finding 
of the very things anticipated, dreamed of, and yet 
every one of them wrapped around with glad surprises, 
as though they had never been heard or thought of 
before ! The treasures of all the earth are here ; and 
hfe, though it goes on for all the years and crowns itself 



THE STOCKING AT THE CHIMNEY. 229 

with riches, and gathers art and every wonder that 
the world contains, shall never in older life have the 
zest, the thrill, the ecstasy, that comes when hild- 
hood is born anew on each Christmas morn, in the 
midst of the fragrant frankincense and myrrh, the 
holy gifts which love offers to its own. 

The world is never so good again through all the 
year as on Christmas morning ; for love then reaches 
the fulness of its tides, and then begins to ebb and 
ebb to the dreary flats of life's unloving work. As we 
grow old, the remembered thrill of the old home and 
its unselfish love comes back at times to reveal to us 
what childhood never saw, — that there is no love so 
patient and unselfish as the love of human homes. 
And as the children grow to manhood and woman- 
hood how parents look back upon the earlier days 
and now interpret all the sacrifices that love made, 
and know at last that in them all there was the hid- 
ing of life's highest joy, and that it is true that life 
reaches its sweet flowering and fruitage in its self- 
denials. 

There has come a vulgarizing of Christmas in later 
years. The demon ostentation has changed love's 
festival into a shopper's carnival, and made merchan- 
dise of affection. But the heart is undying in the 
instincts of its love ; and though the fashions of pride 
and folly change, the old, old fashion of love survives 
forever. And by and by men and women will come 



230 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

back from the showy hypocrisies of Hfe to the old 
hearthstone loves of home : and the stocking at the 
chimney, the heart love of parents and children, will 
reassert itself, and gifts will be once more measured, 
not by the skill lavished upon them by stranger hands, 
but by the love which gives to uncostly gifts a holiness 
all their own. 

The Christmas gift of Christ was a gift of supreme, 
undying love ! This is the meaning of it all : the 
Christmas songs sing love over the rejoicing world, 
the Christmas gifts are meaningless if they are not 
the dumb heart's speech of love ; and the Christmas 
carol of " Peace on earth " is incomplete if it has not 
the glad refrain " Good-will to men," for peace can 
only come where love has lived. 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD 
HOUSE. 



w 



E are in a dismantled home. Every room is 
filled with memories, and to-night every 
remembrance is singing itself within our heart. To 
this home we came long years ago, and here the 
drama of the pleasant years has been enrolled ; here 
friends have come ; here there have been birth and 
joy, sunshine and music, laughter, mirth, the confi- 
dences of friendship, hours of toil, the vows of 
marriage, the weaving of the thousand threads of 
work and service that make the web of human lives. 
Everything but death. And every room has its his- 
tory ; and no palace of the Caesars, however rich in 
historic things, has for us a tithe of the associations 
gathered around this pleasant home, within which 
to-night we sit for the last time, and from which 
to-morrow we go forth forever. 

For more years than we dare to tell we have lived 
among our books within this study. It is not grand 
with carvings nor rich with relics of art ; but we have 
dreamed many a pleasant dream within its walls, and 
have here spent delightful days and years. Kinder 



232 IV AYS IDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

friends never sat within any home than have gath- 
ered here ; and the books which, in spite of us, 
came one by one until they covered all the walls, 
have been silent but delightful companions, ready to 




cheer us with their revelations or their silence, as our 
mood should be. And now they are all gone, taken 
from their familiar places and carried away, as though 
they were dead and had been sent forth for burial. 

It almost seemed as if they too had learned to 
love the place where they had wrought their work; 
and hard as it was to send them away, it would have 
been harder still did we not know that on the mor- 
row we shall follow them. We wonder if those who 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOUSE. 233 

will live here when we are gone will see in the fire 
the old pictures that we have seen ; if they will learn 
to love the vines which trail beneath these windows, 
and to have such pleasant friendships with the flow- 
ers and grasses of this little yard as we have had. We 
hope that the roses when they come will miss us just 
a little ; and we think they will, for they always nodded 
to us, and turned their petals when they first opened 
to the window where we sat. We had no need to do 
it, and it was a waste of money and too impractical 
and foolish for us even to tell, except to friends who 
will not betray us ; but after the deeds had passed, 
we had the old gardener come and set the vines in 
order after the winter's winds, and put the paths and 
beds in shape, that we might have, for the picture that 
memory will hold, the old yard with the order and 
beauty we had seen and loved for all the years. 

These have not been easy days and nights for us. 
One does not know how deep run the rootlets of his 
life, nor how they twine with other roots, until he 
tries to pull them up for transplanting in other soils. 
We shall not try to tell the story of these days, which 
have been days of revelation to us, days when our 
hearts have been full of mingling tears and joy, — tears 
because it has been so hard to break our friendships, 
and joy that we had friendships which were hard to 
break. 

And yet if only our readers will forget that we are 



234 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

speaking of ourselves, and remember that we are tell- 
ing the story of every pastor who goes out to new 
fields, we may convey something that may be of ser- 
vice to us, whether we are pastor or people. But 
whether it shall serve or not, we can write of nothing 
else on this last night, when we sit down by the old 
fire within the old room which to-morrow will have 
an aUen tenant. 

It is the fashion for men to think that the pastor's 
life is one of hardship ; that it is thick with cares and 
busy with unrequited toils ; that it offers no prizes 
for ambition, and has no rewards for devoted effort. 
Education and refinement, which are the essential 
equipments of ministerial success, create taste and 
appreciation for the luxuries of life, and yet the min- 
istry is without the wealth which brings these things. 
Desiring art and the costly instruments of cultured 
life, the daily toil brings only subsistence, while the 
future calls up an apprehension of the poverty so 
galling to the pride and independence which culti- 
vated self-respect has created. It is not often that 
fathers choose the ministry for their sons ; and even 
the mother heart, which is so true and loyal in its 
love, which desires for its children not greatness but 
goodness, not wealth but honor, only with a pang sees 
its offspring select the ministry for its life-work. Here 
and there is a pastor whose life has been hard and 
cheerless, who speaks of his work with regret, and 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOUSE. 235 

cheats himself with visions of the prizes he might 
have won had he chosen differently, — so unwisely 
does the world see. 

The ministry indeed is regarded as a field of effort 
with many labors and but few rewards. We can 
never remember the time when our Ufe was not lived 
among the clergy. We were born in a pastor's home, 
and we have known the whole story of the preacher's 
work from our childhood's days. We have heard the 
tale of hardships and deprivations, have seen true 
and loyal men toiling in hard fields with scant re- 
wards, frail wives and mothers growing prematurely 
old with burdens of hand and heart, and we are by no 
means ignorant of the shadow side of the profession 
to which we ourselves belong. 

But with all this in view, we can think of no other 
field of effort so rich and certain in rewards as that 
of the ministry. What is it that men desire in 
wealth? Is it power? The preacher's office is a 
throne of power. Social rank ? Education and char- 
acter outrank wealth in every assembly. Is it en- 
trance to circles of refinement? Every door swings 
on easy hinges at the preacher's approach. Is it 
opportunity of usefulness ? Every field of helpfulness 
invites the preacher's aid and responds to his service ; 
and if he has no wealth to give, he has the voice that 
can command wealth ; and if his own arm is weak, he 
has the power to command the service of the multi- 



236 IVAYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

tudes, who are always ready for any leadership which 
is sincere and unselfish. 

The splendid compensations of the ministry are 
revealed only to the few whose privilege it is to serve 
their people for many years. The ordinary pastorates 
terminate before these slow-growing tendrils of affec- 
tion interbraid themselves with others ; but when for 
long years pastor and people have lived together, 
severance brings a realization of all the compensa- 
tions of those years. Ordinary fellowships are severed 
without pain ; but friendships that are hallowed by the 
deep experiences of life become so interdependent 
that to separate them is to take away something of 
life. A pastor's life touches human existence as no 
other does. His words give inspiration ; and we are 
always grateful to those who give us the thrill of 
higher ambitions and the ideals of nobler living. To 
every one who realizes the holy solemnity of marriage, 
three lives are bound together by its sacrament ; for 
the hour of bridal, which is to woman life's supremest 
moment, makes an eternal picture in the mind, and in 
it stands forever the one whose words united two des- 
tinies in one. There is no soil that preserves the 
footprints of friends like that which is around an open 
grave ; and no music of human speech is so undying 
as that which receives immortality of remembrance 
by association with the sound of falling clods. In all 
these great experiences of life — and they come at 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOUSE. 237 

some time through the long years to every home — 
the pastor is associated ; and when he goes out, it is 
for pastor and people the taking away of some of the 
foundation stones on which life is built. 

A pastor's life is made up of service for others. 
The pastor is a public servant, and every cause and 
every individual seeks his help. His life is spent in 
making plans and devising aid for others, few think- 
ing ever, as they draw upon his time and sympa- 
thies, that no one can give of his life to others except 
the 'Virtue" go out of him; and there is inevitable 
exhaustion. And so every pastor often asks himself, 
as he renders his unthanked services for others, " Will 
these labors which cost so much ever be appreciated 
by those for whom they are wrought? " And the 
years go on and the burdens multiply, until, when he 
is almost weighed to the ground with cares, and his 
life wearied with service, he learns, but never easily, 
to find in the ministry of service the reward of the 
toil that so exhausts the life. 

Then some day the end comes, by death, per- 
haps ; and when the eye that has so often been wet 
with tears for the sorrow of others can no longer see, 
the hands which laid unthinking burdens on the poor 
stilled heart weave loving flowers of remembrance into 
funeral wreaths. 

Or perhaps the pastor goes to other fields, that he 
may find the rest which comes, not by idleness, but 



238 IV AY SIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

by change of work ; and the revelation comes that 
his labor has not been in vain. He feels the tugging 
of a thousand heart-strings, and old memories that 
slumbered wake to life ; voices that long ago died in 
the great silences speak again ; every service finds a 
tongue, and every sacrifice comes back with blessings, 
and one has all the love and gratitude and friendship 
that death brings, without the pangs of dying. 

So the little partition wall that separates the foun- 
tain of tears from the fountain of laughter is broken 
down by the surging of the waters, and sorrow and 
rejoicing intermingle at the pain of parting, — the joy 
being that friendship is so dear that the parting is 
made hard. 

No joy that life brings is comparable to that of 
ministering to others' needs. This is not preaching 
nor sentiment, but the very philosophy of life. And 
there is no place in all the fields of human enterprise 
that is so rich in opportunities as that of the Christian 
ministry. No occupation is dovvried with such splen- 
did rewards ; not rewards of gold and houses and the 
mere counters of material compensation, but the higher 
prizes of human love and gratitude, as much greater 
than the lower prizes of outward success as the purses 
of the modern race-course are inferior to the wreaths 
of olive-leaves which crowned the winners in Olympic 
games. 

Do we bewail the fact that the young men are 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOUSE. 239 

not crowding the doors of our Theological Schools? 
Have we need for committees on the Increase of the 
Ministry? It is because the wondrous prizes of the 
ministry, its sweet rewards of friendship and love, are 
hidden in men's hearts as too precious things to be 
revealed to human gaze. It is because the world 
does not know how usurious is the compensation of 
the pastor, who is denied the common rewards of 
wealth that he may be enriched with the costHer pay- 
ment of love and gratitude. 

We are revealing no secrets of our merely personal 
life, or depicting that part of the picture of a pastor's 
life on which the sunshine rests, forgetting the shadow 
part. Our own life has been rich with unmerited kind- 
nesses, abundant with undeserved blessings. We do 
not forget those who, with larger desert, have been set 
to toil in harder fields than those where our feet were 
set ; but every pastor, wherever his lot and whatever 
his work, who has toiled long among the same people, 
will bear witness to the fidelity of our assurance, that 
the ministry is rich to affluence with the very highest 
compensations of life. Talk with old pastors who have 
given up their work and are in the world of business, 
and note the moistened eye, the tremor of regretful 
remembrance, as they speak of the joy of their min- 
istry, and hear them tell that the days of their poverty 
were richer in all that makes life precious than are 
the days of their wealth. Yet the service that brings 



240 IVyiYSIDE AND FIRESIDE RAMBLES. 

this triumph must be unselfish ; men must give, hop- 
ing for nothing, remembering that they are set to 
minister, not to be ministered unto, and then the 
blessings will come, because they were unsought and 
unasked. 

But the night is drifting on. While we are busy 
with these pleasant memories, which come back 
freighted with the fragrance of nearly a score of years, 
can it be possible that the years have taken away the 
spring of youth, that makes it look future- ward, not 
backward ; or is it because this room, which grows 
dear as the hour of departure grows nearer, is filled 
with the invisible presences of the multitudes who 
have kept friendship's trysts with us before our study 
fire ? How beautiful it is, as we confront new friends 
and work, to feel that the past, which has been wrought, 
is forever safe ; that no failure of to-morrow can blot 
out the triumph of to-day ; that the past enjoyments 
are secure, though to-morrow shall bring only disap- 
pointment ; and that though one never shall find 
friends so patient to his faults as the old friends, the 
old friends, whether dead or living, are friends forever. 
And yet, thank God, the world is much the same what- 
ever skies are over it, and for every one who tries to 
do his duty in humble but hearty fashion, the great 
world has ready its loving heart and its open hand. 
Love is the richest prize, and it is the easiest pur- 
chased : he who would have friends need only show 



THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOUSE. 24 T 

himself friendly ; and he who wants love can have it 
if only he will offer love in purchase. 

So, somewhere in the world, there shall be another 
study fire ; the new friends shall gather around it, and 
not one of the old friends shall we let go. Some- 
where we shall find another study window, which will 
look out, we hope, upon the vines and flowers, and 
somewhere else we shall find friends as true and faith- 
ful as these whose remembered kindnesses are sing- 
ing themselves to-night within our heart. 

We shall not put any fuel to-night upon our fire, as 
has been our wont, for to-morrow we shall not come 
here to our daily task. The study fire will have gone 
out, and there will be only ashes in the familiar place. 
But nothing shall ever take away the pleasant friend- 
ships, the dreams and loves that have been witnessed 
here, nor rob us of the sweet delights that through 
nearly a score of years we have had within this 
pleasant room. 




